How to Set a New Point of Focus for Your Story’s Image

A fix for when Medium’s default cropping doesn’t work for your image

Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash

Hi Writers!

In this Quick Tip Edition, I’ll share a nifty trick on how to set a new point of focus for your story’s main image. This can improve the look of your posts when viewed in a publication’s list of stories.

Here’s how I discovered the importance of setting a new point of focus.

A while back, I used the following image with one of my stories:

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

This simple image was the perfect match for my content. But when my post showed up in the publication’s list of stories, I noticed the image had been cropped.

It looked a bit like this:

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Not very interesting! Who’s gonna click on that?!

I realized then that images get cropped for story listings and that Medium uses the center of the image as the default for this. Totally makes sense…