Recommended Best Practices for working with images on Confluence pages

[Laura McWilliams]

I can't seem to find any documented recommendations about adding images to Confluence pages to get the best results. I have been just copying and pasting in images because that's the fastest way to do it, but sometimes the image quality doesn't look great later. I'm getting ready to go through and redo my screenshots now that I have more time.

Is there a recommended size and DPI we should use (I'm guessing probably 300 DPI for the types of images I'm using, which are mostly screenshots) and method for inserting them?

Thanks

[Owen Wallis]

Hi @Laura McWilliams,

Thanks for your question. The key thing you want to be looking at in the image is pixel size (rather than dpi).

The width of a normal page in Confluence is 760px. So if you upload an image say of 640px it will appear floating in the middle of the page. If you then stretch that image to be the same width as the page you'll start seeing some degradation.

If you upload an image wider than 760px it will fill the width of the page container. 

If you set your page to full width it stretches to whatever size your monitor is set to. So you'll want to be uploading really big images if you have a really big monitor!

[Laura McWilliams]

Hi @Owen Wallis thanks so much for your response.

Most of my images are about 800 pixels wide, and it's surprising to me that they are wider than the default confluence page size b/c I thought that was pretty narrow. However, my computer has a retina screen which is pretty high-res so maybe that's why. I always use my built-in screen for screenshots b/c I want to make sure it will fit on a smaller screen; my separate monitor is HUGE.

I think my bigger issue is that I can't seem to control the size the images display at. I want them to be a fixed size based on the actual size of the picture. But when I bring them into Confluence, they seem to automatically resize. The biggest issue is when I screenshot a dialog window which should be narrower than the main window. I might use something closer to 400-500 pixels wide. When I import it to Confluence it automatically resizes to be the same size as the other screenshots. Then the only way I can seem to resize it is by dragging those bars. I don't want to have to drag it around to resize, I just want the image to show up in actual size. That way the relative sizes of all the images will be correct. How can I do that?

[Owen Wallis]

Hi Laura,

The ability to resize images by pixels is not on the new editor just yet.

You can watch the related ticket here for updates: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67554

It has a lot of votes and the team here is aware of the need of this feature.

Hope you can continue to work with dragging to resize in the meantime.

All the best

Owen

[Laura McWilliams]

Thanks for the info @OW and it's kind of sad that after all this time, it looks like it still hasn't been addressed?

[Arturo Fernandez]

@Owen Wallis Can the team please prioritize adding this functionality? It seems absurd that you can't add images that are not square. Users should be able to add wide images in a straightforward fashion. 

[Nina Barley]

Images used to be super easy to work with in Confluence. Now, they're super hard. I have no control over the size, and Confluence seems to do it's own thing with them no matter how I try to resize them. Go back to the old model, and you'll save us all a lot of frustration!

[francois.bonnard]

Hello @Owen Wallis 

What about importing images with alpha channels  in last version of Confluence board ?  Is there a specific format ?

Thanks

[Liz Burns]

2 years since the last answer and images still randomly dither, regardless of size. Considering other platforms don't have a problem with this issue, what is the answer?

5 years ago I was working with the Cloud instance and images are rendering much worse than in 2018. Pasting an image, attaching a screenshot - it makes no difference, it looks awful in every way and makes Atlassian - and their Confluence clients - look like amateurs. What benefits were imagined back then when the decision was made to downgrade graphics efficacy? 

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

My team put together this page on things to consider when adding images: https://www.k15t.com/rock-the-docs/creating-topics/add-images-and-videos

Unfortunately, we didn't' touch on size or DPI. 🙁 I'll see if we can circle back to add that. In general, we try to follow website best practices: 

• https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips#four
• https://www.foregroundweb.com/image-size/#1_Best_image_sizes_for_websites_dimensions_in_pixels

[Laura McWilliams]

Thanks for the reply. It's nice information but not really specific to my problem.

I think I'm having a more general problem with Confluence. I can't seem to control the image size at all. I thought maybe the problem has to do with using Control-V to paste in images, so I switched over to using the "add image" button. But it does really weird things, and I'm starting to suspect this is why some of my images don't look great later on.

I will create an image that is just the size I want for optimal display, but when I insert it into the Confluence page, it resizes it automatically, and I can't seem to find anyway to actually set it to display the image at actual size. This is getting really frustrating and I don't understand why Confluence itself doesn't seem to have any documentation about itself.