When you post a photo in the chat, it appears in the chat sometimes randomly cropped, which isn’t always desirable, or the focus is on the wrong part of the image. Tapping the photo then shows the uncropped version.
I propose giving the user control over cropping and centering of photos they post in the chat. Let the user who posts a photo decide if the photo should appear cropped or not in the chat, and if it should be cropped, where the center/focus of the image should be for the preview as it appears in the chat.
I’d say this is too intricate of a feature for an “instant messaging app”, so it’s better to just not crop the image and make it fit into the container.
Delta Chat for Desktop takes this approach.
in android there is not much space and “make it fit” would mean a super thin stripe for screenshots or longer “tall” images or the same but vertical, the way it is done in DC Desktop is wayyyy far from perfect, and indeed, it often looks ugly and with truncated timestamps and reactions due to message width being too small, but at least there you have more screen space and more clicking precision with a mouse pointer