How Featured Images Work on Medium & How to Set the ‘Focal Point’

I was curious how Medium “decides” to crop featured images. So I did some testing. I also learned a super valuable trick on how to set the focal point of your featured image.

First some basics

The content area of a Medium post is 700px wide (px is pixels).

That means any image wider than 700px will get scaled to 700px width and the height will adjust accordingly.

The Medium featured image is a 112x112px square.

What we want to know is how and why that featured image square looks the way it does.

The Experiment

Let’s start with this image below. Originally it’s 1200x600px. Medium scales it to a width of 700px and the height adjusts accordingly to 350px (.58 scale of original image).

My first hypothesis was that Medium will default to cropping an image in the center. So if we draw a square in the center of the above image, we should be able to guess what our featured image will be.

Here’s my guess: