The special treatment of panorama images in galleries plugin has been turned off in scale_images since it would produce very wide thumbnails that messed up page layout.

Is there a page layout? Last time I checked, galleries just dump photos at random without any layout involved.

And at the same time, your change only destroys image quality. The thumbnails’ sizes is determined in the output HTML, and it’s not even trying to make the aspect ratio right.

Also, I’m skeptical about IMAGE_THUMBNAIL_SIZE, why not produce images of the same size everywhere and be consistent? It should also default to 180 not to break existing sites.

The intended usage scenario for these "thumbnails" is to have illustrations in articles that are enlargeable, like on Wikipedia and similar sites. Please see this page on my site under construction for an example (figures 3, 5 and some others are enlargeable):

http://nyckelpigan.info:8802/pantarei/posts/snowline-tutorial/

THUMBNAIL_SIZE is set a bit lower than the article width so that all images fit nicely into the layout, but figure 9 is treated as a panorama and therefore becomes far too wide to fit.

How would it look, if not for the panorama magic? Also, you seem to be using images here and not galleries.

I guess you could use it in the post images.

Looks okay. Let’s make 400 the default and hope nobody notices/cares or they just set it back to 180.