Solving the White Border Problem in Highwire Images
The Highwire shopping cart is set to display product images as squares. This allows them to be spaced evenly. If the image is rectangular, instead of square, the system adds white bars to square it off.If your template has a white background, this isn't a problem.
But if you have a colored or patterned background, you may not like seeing the white bars. What can you do?
As of this writing, there's no way to change the color of the bars. But there are some workarounds.
The default squared-off image is "fixed". Go to Settings > General Settings > Product Settings. You will see that Image Formatting is set to "Use Fixed Images". If you change it to "Use Constrained Images", the images you upload after that will display as rectangles. You will have to re-load any existing images to make them constrained.
When using Constrained images, if all your images are the same size and shape, you can use your style sheet to space them neatly from text and other images.
But what if they're different shapes?
One choice is to superimpose each image onto a colored square, and save as a new image. You can choose a color that matches or complements your background, so the bars will blend in better than white ones.
But what if you change to a different-colored template someday?
The solution to that can also be used as a solution to the original white bars. Style photos on your product details page with a background matching the bars, and add a few pixels of padding. This puts your image and thumbnails into a rectangular section the same color as the bars around the images. It looks stylish, as though you meant it that way! (And you can use the same technique to put a little colored box around each thumbnail in the product list, featured, and cross promote, also.)
