The shipped demo images include stock photography, one image repeated across all seven podcast episodes, and mostly low-resolution files

Problem/Motivation

Three measured findings about the 38 images the recipe ships.

1. Two are generic corporate stock

They are the only two that break the design's visual language, which is otherwise art, architecture and design photography:

• team-working-on-laptops.jpg — a posed team-around-a-table shot, currently the lead image on the Studios landing page, attached to "Bloom & Ash, Kiro Tanaka, and Lea Wren Launch New Collective".
• colleagues-at-monitors.jpg — same library, attached to "Why More Studios Are Charging for the Pitch Itself", and only 650x366.

For contrast, office-meeting-by-windows.jpg shows the standard the set otherwise meets: naturalistic, unposed, editorial.

2. One image carries all seven podcast episodes

circle-of-chairs.jpg is the featured image on all 7 podcast episodes (Episodes 11 to 17 of Last Call), where every other image appears once or twice — 32 distinct images across 33 news articles and 7 podcast episodes. The repetition is visible in any listing.

3. Most files are small

27 of the 38 images are under 1200px wide, the smallest being striped-street-facade.png at 310x175, while Drimage Improved is configured to generate derivatives up to 3840px and the markup declares intrinsic sizes such as 2640x1760. Several are square sources used in 16:9 slots, so they are cropped hard and upscaled. The site's flagship lead, "The Architecture of Unease", uses a 1024x1024 file.

The same limit applies to the media available for episode covers:

• Six of the seven episode covers are 620px or smaller.
• podcast-microphone-mark.jpg, vintage-studio-microphone.png and purple-grid-collage.png are landscape (620x348). They are cropped to the square cover slot, and their 348px height is upscaled to the 520px derivative, so they look soft on high-density screens.
• The 620x620 covers are adequate at 1x but below 2x.
• Only teal-light-staircase.jpg (1984x2142) has headroom.

Steps to reproduce

1. Install the RightUp site template on Varbase 11 from 1.0.x-dev.
2. List the shipped media files and their pixel dimensions.
3. Count how many articles each featured image is attached to.
4. Compare the two office-stock images against the rest of the set and against the design.

Proposed resolution

• Replace the two stock photographs with licensed photography matching the design's voice.
• Interim, in progress in its own MR: give each podcast episode its own cover from the podcast images already shipped in the recipe, with no new external images.
• Then replace those interim covers with licensed, higher-resolution episode covers. Still open.
• Raise the low-resolution files to at least the largest rendered slot.

The interim covers do not close this: they reuse the show-cover images from the Podcasts and Last Call pages, so the same picture appears both as a show cover and as an episode cover. That duplication, and the licensing, are why real photography is still needed.

Remaining tasks

• ❌ Interim unique episode covers from shipped media (MR pending)
• ❌ Source licensed replacements for the two stock images.
• ❌ Licensed, higher-resolution covers for the seven podcast episodes.
• ❌ Re-export the low-resolution files at a size that covers the largest rendered slot.

• ✅ File an issue
• ❌ Addition/Change/Update/Fix
• ❌ Testing to ensure no regression
• ➖ Automated unit/functional testing coverage
• ➖ Developer Documentation support
• ➖ User Guide Documentation support
• ❌ UX/UI designer responsibilities
• ❌ Accessibility and Readability
• ❌ Reviewed by a human
• ❌ Code review by maintainers
• ❌ Full testing and approval
• ❌ Credit contributors
• ❌ Review with the product owner
• ❌ Update Release Notes
• ❌ Release

User interface changes

• Demo pages and listings show different, sharper, on-brand photography.

API changes

• N/A

Data model changes

• N/A

Release notes snippet

• N/A

AI-Generated: Yes