Image alignment is driving me bonkers. I publish print articles at least once a month, and since the rights revert to me I try to put them on my site, using thumbnail images to link to articles. But since the magazines in which I publish have slightly different sizes, and the titles vary in length, it takes me hours to adjust the thumbnails so that they align left, one after the other, rather than leaving one dangling by itself when the screen is resized. http://www.boldizar.com/blog/nonfiction/

Jim at http://wordpress.bytesforall.com/?p=67#comments wrote me back saying: “I’m with you completely on the sad lack of satisfactory “image handling” ..though, I’d encompass the whole WordPress scene and not just zero in on Atahualpa. You might consider either locking the width of your site or, at least, setting min and max widths. I’m noticing a lot more fixed width sites these days. Another cure might be to look into having your thumbnails and comments handled by a plugin such as NextGen Gallery or somesuch. I’d suggest asking questions at the Atahualpa forum at BytesForAll — there are A LOT of Atahualpa users and some of them are very clever AND helpful!“

Neither locking the widths nor using a gallery are optimal solutions for me. Is there no way to simply have the images-with-captions stack left one after the other?

I would be grateful for any advice!!

How are you getting the images into the post? are you using a plugin or coding the code by hand?

If doing it by hand, have you thought of using a table?

This is a limitation of CSS itself, if your containers don't have the same height, some of them will hang somewhere in the middle.

Give them a height with A CSS Insert:

div.wp-caption {height: 210px}

to have them align properly. When the caption text doesn't fit in, the boxes should still align but the text would stick out of the borders of the caption. To avoid this give the wp-caption as much height as needed to cover even the longest caption texts. This will create white space in the boxes with less text, but what you're after would create white space below the boxes, so there will be white space either way. Giving the boxes a fixed height and bringing the white space into the boxes is the cleaner looking alternative in my opinion.

And regarding fixed width becoming popular. They've always been popular, maybe because they're easier to deal with? A fluid width layout that doesn't break in any browser is much harder to accomplish.

Thanks, Flynn! That seems to have done the trick. I'm a noob at this stuff, so I wasn't sure where to stick the CSS insert, but I went into style.css, looked for the area that talked about captions, and added your line at the end. My Nonfiction page caption-image-links are now aligning perfectly, and I can even take the "....." placeholders out that I'd previously used to make all the captions the same size. I'm just hoping it doesn't now force all my images on other pages that include captions into a height of 210px.

Time to figure out how to make a donation...