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for ongoing cleanup projects.
Let's have a vote. Who else dislikes the borders?
Me, I'm fine with them.
I can't find what started it, but the image pick threads I've look just seem to keep doing it to maintain a standard. I agree that they don't look great.
I also wonder why the imaged are so small? It's usually just focusing on the character's face, instead of a full-body shot. It looks weird since they're right beside a giant cluster of trivial info that's usually bigger than the image itself.
Edited by BlackMage43
This came up in February
when I noticed emperormasakado added borders to Harry Potter character images and I reverted them. Apparently when the Expanded Universe was rebooted, the Star Wars project thread decided to standardize character page images as 300x300px with a black border. I agree the borders look ugly, especially considering the caption box already acts as a border.
In light of all this, does TV Tropes not have a wiki standard for these images? It's just really jarring to see borders here when the rest of the site — characters, works, creators, tropes, etc. — don't use them. Certainly, the borders create uniformity among their respective pages but in the wider context, they're rather out of place, and redundant since as previously mentioned, the caption box already serves the same purpose.
I agree. The caption box should be sufficient enough.
The borders aren't disallowed, but I agree that they're unnecessary and aesthetically unpleasant.
Yeah, I don't like 'em either.
They seem better without them.
Should we take this to a general Image Picking thread?
I'm not familiar with TV Tropes' internal workings, but if there's ever going to be a voting prcoess, then I'm going to be on the Remove the Borders side.
Yeah, I hate the borders.
Illuminate!
I dislike the borders, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort to remove them all. In addition to Star Wars and the MCU, there's also Fullmetal Alchemist (changed by emperormasakado), Game of Thrones, RWBY, and probably more.
BlackMage43, I think 300px wide is big enough for most character images. I've seen some images that are way bigger than they need to be even if they don't go past the tropes in the folder, particularly full-body art like on Characters.Pokemon Aether Foundation. 350px is the maximum width, not the standard one, and I usually don't like images to be that big unless they're horizontal or particularly detailed.
Edited by rjd1922 Keet cleanup
I don't like them either.
^^ Maybe not a full-on "comb through every character page" cleanup effort, but more of a "swap it out when we see it" one.
^^^ I just think it's still best for a character image to be a full-body shot than just a face. A character is more than it's face.
If the black border is spreading to a lot of pages it may be worth taking this to a thread even if it's just to stop it from spreading more.
Edited by BlackMage43
I agree that full-body or at least waist-up images are better than just faces in most cases.
Keet cleanup
So...
Is there any attempt to change this? Like a thread or something?
^ You're allowed to make one in Image Pickin'. I assume the thread would be approved.
Couple of points.
1. I also think the black borders don't look pretty on white background. (It's a non-issue on nightvision though so I wouldn't really notice.)2. It's preferable when images on one page/ from one work are unified. Same style, same size.
3. It's near impossible to unify character images on the wiki scale, because we have so many character sheets and more importantly: they come from many different media. (For older works, we might be happy to get some screen grabs. Some characters are from internet shows that are just Talking Heads — there wouldn't be any pictures of the whole body. It's different for live-action media, comic books, animation or video games. It's different for niche works and high profile shows that have promo photo shoots every new season.)
Edited by XFllo
I never really got that fixation with borders on the MCU character pages either
Edited by Forenperser Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian
On the same note, I also don't get the fixation of having to use images that are part of promotional pictures of the newest movie / season.
It makes for some very awkward looking ones.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian
~The12thDoctor replaced the images on Characters.Frozen Anna and Characters.Frozen Elsa with ones from Frozen II with borders. While updating the images for the sequel is OK, there's no need to add borders.
EDIT: They did the same for Olaf's image on Characters.Frozen Magical Creatures.
Edited by rjd1922 Keet cleanup
Were their replacements approved?
I don't see anything on IP, but it's common practice to update character images if their appearance changes with new installments/episodes.
Keet cleanup
So, is this going anywhere? Should we start a forum thread with a crowner and pm the link to all tropers who voted here?
^ Go for it.
Something I've noticed with Character pages like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars is that, unlike a lot of other works, their characters have bordered profile shots? As in, black frames covering a lot if not all character photos.
Why is that, exactly? It's really jarring when coming from other articles and frankly speaking clashes with the site's UI.