This week we’re announcing an improvement to photo storage and photo scaling for Micro.blog Premium subscribers, our $10/month plan that also includes up to 5 blogs, email newsletters, bookmark archiving, and highlights.
For years now, we’ve scaled photos down to about 1800x1800 when uploading them to Micro.blog. This has been a good balance of resolution and file size. Photos still look good on the web, and they take up a little less space by default.
Now with Micro.blog Premium, we’re also saving a separate larger version, with resolution up to about 3000x3000. This version of the photo is available for themes to use, and it automatically works with the “Photo collections” plug-in, so that when you click on a photo in a collection it uses the higher resolution when zooming the photo to full screen in your web browser.
For more about photo collections, see this help page.
In the web interface to Micro.blog, for uploads you’ll start seeing little icons for various sizes of a photo: small, medium, or the new “extra large” size. These icons link to that resolution. Here’s a screenshot:
The URLs for photo sizes are available in the Hugo front matter under the existing .photos_with_metadata array:
- url: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename.jpg
sizes:
small: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename-s.jpg
medium: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename-m.jpg
xl: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename-xl.jpg
You might wonder why we handle photo URLs this way, while other platforms try to hide the implementation behind random, super-long CDN URLs and dynamic scaling. I find that approach confusing whenever you need to customize anything. All the technical bits in Micro.blog are designed to be human readable. You should be able to view HTML source if you need to and not be completely lost.
Hope you find this new size useful! As more larger photos are saved, there will be opportunities for further tweaks to use the different sizes in more places. But I wanted to get the foundation for this change out now.
