Medium has three options for sizing photos in your stories, but sometimes you want to manage how they appear in your story. It might look better if one photo is smaller than another more important photo, or you may need to prevent a tall photo from taking too much height in the story.

The simplest way to control the height of an image is to add white space beside the image.

Medium first gives you the choice of column-wide, extra-wide, or edge-to-edge sizes (as long as the photo has enough resolution). This isn’t really the size of the image, you are just setting the width. The aspect ratio of the image will then determine the height of the image in the story column.

Adding white space on the left and right shortens the aspect ratio, so the overall image now has less height.

In this photo from my March story in Full Frame’s 52 Week Photo Project, I wanted to add a second photo showing the snowblower flinging the snow up to the top of the hill, and I wanted that second photo to be just a sidenote, not an equally important (by size) image.

The secondary photo was brought into Photoshop and the canvas (not the image!) resized by about 300% horizontally and filled with white. Now it’s the right size — just an illustrative photo inline with the story. It isn’t meant to grab attention away from the main photo, or try and be its equal.

Did you know you could center-justify text on Medium?

There isn’t really a center-align option but you can create this, if that’s how you want to title to appear. Try and select the text in the title of the “it’s art” photo above.

The title is actually an image, and also solves the problem of Medium’s font not being built into Photoshop.

First, use the display snipping tool to clip an empty rectangle the width of a line in the Medium story in the browser, and about the text height of one line. On this PC, that’s 700 pixels wide, 22 pixels high. Start a new image in Photoshop using this graphic from the clipboard.

Type the title you want, using bold or italic as desired, in the Medium story. Snip out that text, and center that graphic piece onto the blank rectangle in Photoshop. This can now be flattened, saved as a jpg, and brought into the story immediately below the photo as the title.

The same technique can be used to create photos with side text. Since a line (on my browser) is 700 pixels wide, I would suggest first resizing your photo with the blank panel to 700 pixels before clipping text and adding it onto layers, so everything should be the right size. You could also use one of Photoshop’s own fonts.

Controlling the height of a photo by modifying its aspect ration is also useful for tall photos. Usually, you want some text to still be visible and almost certainly you want the entire tall photo to be on the display at once.

Here’s one extreme example of a too-tall photo, the moon and Venus (350 pixels wide, 1600 pixels tall). But that isn’t what I want you to see.

This is better. It’s harder to see Venus and I had to make the photo a bit brighter but now it flows in the story much more nicely. The canvas was made about 500% wider and filled with white, and the photo set to column width on Medium.

A two-photo comparison is useful if you’re showing the original photo and what you created from it. Medium does let you drag photos into your draft (select and drag them in all at the same time) but the layout is up to the Medium reader app — four images might be a 2 x 2 arrangement on a desktop browser, but appear as four in line on a phone.

In this pair I wanted to show the original scene and what it looked like when using an infrared filter on my iPhone.

Padding a photo with whitespace on each side is the simplest and most useful way to shorten tall images, or make a minor image an appropriate small size in a story.

All photos by Andy Fraser.

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Managing Photo Layouts on Medium was originally published in Full Frame on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.