Cover image focus area

When choosing a cover image, you are able to choose a square part of the image. However, due to the dynamic nature of the pagestrip platform, your image might sometimes have to be used at a different aspect ratio, like a rectangle.

You will often want to retain a certain focus area of the image, even when it is cropped. The focus area refers to the “interesting” part of the image, which should be retained in all aspect ratios.

To choose a focus area for a cover image, click the “Set Focus” button in the inspector while the cover image is selected.

This will enter a mode to choose the focus area. To do so, drag the selection handles or move the entire selection to cover the area that you want to preserve. In this case, we want to make sure that the woman and the dog are visible at all times.

Click the “Done” button in the inspector to confirm your selection.

Note: If you choose too big of a focus area where the is too little potential to crop the image, your focus area might not preserved entirely when the image is cropped. Make sure to choose a focus area as small as possible.

Sometimes, the editor will be able to recognize “interesting” areas (such as detected faces) in your image and provide a predefined focus area automatically. You can always set a focus area manually, though.

It is highly advisable to only use images as story covers that provide enough background to be cropped to rectangles at a more narrow aspect ratio. If your image needs to preserved in its entirety to be meaningful (such as when it contains text or a logo), it might look out of place in certain contexts where you can’t influence it, like when sharing on Facebook or Twitter. Thus, ensure that you stick to images that have a small region of interest, which can be preserved meaningfully.

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