Hi Paul,
No apologies needed. When I hear people asking about responsive images they are usually using the same term to describe two different types of behavior – a) changing resolutions of an image to fit a browsers size and pixel density and b) serving different crops (aspect ratio switching) of the same image at different breakpoints, i.e., the art direction use case.
This plugin only covers the first case, and does so by taking advantage of the new srcset attribute using w descriptors to let the browser know all of the available images from which it could choose depending on its size and density. In our next release, we will be adding the sizes attribute to tell browsers how wide the image will be at each breakpoint.
I hope that helps.
– Joe
Thank you Joe, understood, so I think if I have 1:1 ratio images in a couple of sizes it would probably make sense to ‘regenerate thumbnails’ to make more options available to the browser. If it only had one option (okay unrealistic) then responsiveness wouldn’t be an option anyway. Is that about right? I guess the trick is deciding what sizes I need to generate.
That’s correct. For any image using an exact (i.e., hard cropped) ratio, you’ll need to add additional image sizes for every option you want to use. For example, if you have 150px square thumbnails and want to include a 2x version, you would also need to add a 300px square option. Regenerating thumbnails would then create the 300px size for all the images you have already uploaded (as long as the original is large enough).