What a profile grid does to a photograph
A profile grid is not a picture with lines drawn on it. It is nine separate files displayed with a gap between them, each shown as a 3:4 thumbnail cut from the middle of a 4:5 post, and each 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.
The 3:4 grid, and what happens to the edges of each post
From late January 2025 the profile grid shows posts as 3:4 rectangles rather than squares, and a portrait post uploads at 4:5. The grid crops the centre of each 4:5 post to 3:4: of a 1080 × 1350 upload, roughly the middle 1013 × 1350 is visible in the grid. So each file this board writes is a 4:5 upload with its 3:4 visible zone centred, and the visible zones are what tile your picture edge to edge.
That leaves a strip of about 33 pixels on each side of every upload that the grid never shows but an opened post does. By default those strips carry the real picture next to the zone, so a post opened on its own looks like a natural photograph rather than one with a band down each side. The outer columns have no picture beyond the edge unless the framing leaves some spare; where there is none, they take bars, and the inspector says which. Choose Bars instead if you would rather every strip be plain.
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 of 3:4 tiles wants a 3:4 portrait source — close to what a phone camera produces. A landscape loses its sides. Nine tiles.
- 3 × 4 wants a 9:16 upright rectangle, the shape of a full-screen phone photo or story. Twelve tiles.
- 3 × 5 wants a very tall 9:20 rectangle. Good for a standing subject or a tower, 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.
