Why does ibooks author automatically resize all images of a gallery?

Question

The point here is, I have more than one graphic files (not pictures taken by a camera) to put into one gallery widget of an iBooks Author document. Unfortunately, not all figures have the same height/width aspect ratio. If I put them together in the gallery, some of them have cropped widths others have cropped heights. Impossible to losslessly fit all into the same gallery. If I scale alle figures to the same width, the result is acceptable for the figure with the highest heigth, all other figures are cropped again.
Well in a first time, I was not that much concerned, but the iBooks Author Quality check refused to publish such eBooks, where some picutes appear cropped in the small view (not in the full-screen view).
Now, why is the iBA software automatically sizing all images of a gallery w.r.t. the center of an image? It would be of much more help, to leave some white background boarders on images of un-equal height, as long as the width of all images is exactly the same. The crop-pan function would then be useful to individually place a smaller-than-the-rest image in that frame of its larger precedecor image.
Can this autosize function be turned off? Am I really forced to paste smaller images into a white image of the maximum height/width of the galery's largest image?

Answer 1

If you have differently shaped (height/width) images that you want to place in one gallery....
The first image you place will determine the shape (max height and width) of your gallery mask, so choose it wisely.
Before you add each image to the gallery go to photoshop and:
1. Size the IMAGE to be at the max height OR width of your gallery mask -- do this if you want at least one dimension (height or width) to fit all the way across or up and down in the gallery mask.
2. Size the CANVAS to the same height and width of your first image (the size of your gallery mask).
I hope this makes sense and is helpful. Yes, it's ridiculous, but it's the only way I found to make images of different dimensions fit in a gallery.