Change 838071 had a related patch set uploaded (by Matthias Mullie; author: Matthias Mullie):

[mediawiki/core@master] Search thumbnails visual tweaks

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/838071

Change 838071 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/core@master] Search thumbnails visual tweaks

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/838071

@matthiasmullie are the file thumbnails going to be square too? I thought we will keep them as is because it helps with, perhaps, highlighting the difference in interactions with thumbnails on article vs files. For files it would be good to see the entire image since thats's what the user searched for.

Right now, file thumbnails are indeed also square.

There were a couple of thumbnail changes that kind of necessitated changing those as well (e.g. they became smaller & whitespace changed a bit)
Since there was no explicit indication of how to adjust file thumbnails in response, I assumed we'd be making the same changes there (see T306883#8202831 for more context)

We can go back and change file thumbnails if we wanted to; e.g. containing them within the bounding box like they used to, instead of filling.
That said, I don't think that would be particularly useful WRT "highlighting the difference", since a square-ish file thumbnail would still look like a square article thumbnail.

Can you create a new ticket with details for what we want file thumbnails to look like?

okay thanks for the background. Based on what you said, we can leave file thumbnails as they are for now. This is only my assumption that it may cause some interaction confusion but it may not as user's may have different expectations of what they do based on the type of results. If we hear any concerns we can re-evaluate.