What a profile grid does to a photograph
A profile grid is not a picture with lines drawn on it. It is nine separate square files displayed with a gap between them, each one trimmed a little at the edge by the layout, and each one re-encoded on the way in. Everything that makes a grid work or fail is a consequence of those three facts rather than of the cut itself.
So the preview on this page shows the destination, not the canvas. The tiles are drawn apart, at the proportions the grid uses, with the gutter present. A horizon that runs cleanly across a photograph looks continuous under a lattice and interrupted in that preview, and the preview is the honest one.
There is no face detection here and none is planned for this version. The tool knows where the boundaries fall and nothing at all about what is standing on them.
3 × 3, 3 × 4 or 3 × 5
Three columns is fixed, because that is how many a profile shows. What you are choosing is how far down the picture goes and, with it, the shape of the rectangle the tiles are cut from.
- 3 × 3 wants a square source. A landscape photograph loses its sides; a portrait loses its top and bottom. Nine tiles.
- 3 × 4 wants a 3:4 upright rectangle, which is close to what a phone camera already produces. Twelve tiles, and usually the least cropping of the three.
- 3 × 5 wants a tall 3:5 rectangle. Good for a standing subject or a long building, wasteful of a landscape frame. Fifteen tiles.
Whichever you pick, the framing control reports how many pixels crop-to-fit removes before you commit to it, and pad-to-fit is there when the answer is that nothing may be removed.
The upload order is backwards on purpose
The newest post goes top left and everything else shifts along, so a grid assembles in reverse: the bottom-right tile is uploaded first and the top-left tile last. The number printed on each tile in the preview is that upload position. The file names still carry row and column, so nothing is ambiguous when you are half way through and looking at a folder.
The same list ships inside the archive as posting-order.txt, with each file’s pixel size beside it. That file exists because the sequence is the part people get wrong, and getting it wrong is only recoverable by deleting posts.
Where a profile grid goes wrong
- Which tile do I post first?
- The bottom-right one. A profile fills from the top left with whatever was posted most recently, so the tile that has to end up top left is the one you upload last. Nine tiles means uploading in reverse reading order, and the number printed on each tile in the preview is that upload position — not the file’s position in the grid. The archive carries the same list as a text file.
- Why are the tiles square when my photo is not?
- A profile grid shows squares, so a 3 × 3 needs a source rectangle three units wide by three tall. A 3:2 photograph is not that, and the difference has to be resolved before the cut rather than discovered after it. Crop to fit takes the largest square-ish rectangle out of the picture and lets you drag which part; pad to fit keeps every pixel and adds bars.
- My edges do not match up in the finished grid.
- Two things are happening at once and only one is yours. The grid draws a gutter between tiles, so a subject that runs across a boundary is interrupted by design. Separately, the platform re-encodes every file it receives, and two adjacent JPEGs re-encoded independently can differ by a shade along the shared edge. Neither is a cutting error, and neither is fixable at this end.
- Can I post it over several days?
- Yes, and the order is the only thing that matters. Post the bottom row first, right to left, then the middle row, then the top. Anything else posted in between lands in the sequence too and pushes the whole grid along by one, which is the usual way a half-built grid goes wrong.
- Does 3 × 4 or 3 × 5 work the same way?
- Identically. The column count is fixed at three because that is what the profile shows; the row count is yours. Twelve or fifteen tiles take longer to post and the arithmetic is the same — the last tile you upload is the one that ends up top left.