How do you handle image resolution and file size in a spatial canvas.

In a file browser image files all feel about the same, even though they can vary widely in resolution and size. When you drop them into a spatial canvas web app, that app has to decide how to size. The most 'honest' way would probably be to render them at the resolution of the files - but i think this would often be surprising to people - they won't understand why some images are twice the size of others.

So you want to normalize, probably pick a max size and scale big ones down to that - then you have to think about how you want to manage that for performance. Do you use canvas to resize it down 'for real'? That means if it was bigger you lose that extra resolution. What if the user later actually wants in that big? Probably you want to keep the original size in case needed - but then how do you indicate to the user that some of the images on the canvas could size up without degradation and some would look rough. You list the resolution of course - but if you're a user working on arranging things it feels like its forcing you to switch between this spatial flow to think through math resolution.

You could show a red outline or something when something gets resized above resolution. But while that makes sense in isolation, in the context of an app with a bunch of other things going on I think it could be confusing noise. Plus sometimes if it's just getting scaled up a little it's probably fine - and you don't want to create the feeling of a problem where there isn't one.

My impulse is always to find a way to give the user information more directly so they can then build intuition around it. But it's hard in this one.

You almost want to indicate heaviness or something like that for big files.

It's a knotty problem but that's also probably means there's some fun solutions (or at least experiments) to be done with it.

At heart a question of whether it should be "don't make the user think about it" or "give the user enough info to think about it clearly". Is it real complexity or incidental complexity. And of course this partly dependes on where the output is headed... to be printed? To be imported into another program?