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Asked: 2026-06-17T18:34:04+00:00

I know I could do this with a bunch of nested if statements, however

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I know I could do this with a bunch of nested if statements, however I can’t help feel like there’s a more elegant way. It’s really just a maths issue I guess, but I’m interested in pythonic answers if indeed there are any.

I have an image which can be ANY dimensions / aspect ratio.

It must be scaled up OR down so that it covers a minumum of 55w x 168h

The complication here is that it needs to be scaled by a function that takes only a single value which specifies the length of a side of a square which the image it will fit inside.

For instance, say we have an image of size 1000w x 500h and we scale it to 200, then the resulting image must fit inside a square the with a side of 200, meaning the resulting image would be 200w x 100h.

Conversely if our image is 200×1000 and we scale to to 200, we’ll end up with 40×200.

So to scale an image of 1000×500 to cover 55×168, we’d need to scale it to 336, giving a size of 336×168 since that’s the largest image which can fit inside a 336×336 sided square.

And to scale an image of 200×1000 to cover 55×168, we’d need to scale it to 275 and end up with 55×275.

Hopefully this is clearer than mud! Thanks for any ideas.

Justification: For those who are interested in why I’m scaling via a value of a square side, this is the way Picasa scales images via URL injection. For instance take the following 2 URLs:

Notice both have the URL component s150, however one image is 150×112 and the other is 112×150. 150 is the value of the square these images will both fit in.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    def name_of_function(img_x, img_y):  # for lack of a better name
    image_dimensions = (img_x, img_y)
    min_dimensions = (55.0, 168.0)
    scale = min(image_dimensions[i]/min_dimensions[i] for i in range(2))
    return max(i/scale for i in image_dimensions)

name_of_function(1000, 500)
# 336.0
name_of_function(200, 1000)
# 275.0

    Pretty sure this is what you’re looking for.

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