UPDATE: I think I've spotted what's going on. There's a maximum image size specified of 1600 x 1080, meaning any uploaded pictures will be downscaled to this size in a proportion of 1.48 to 1.
It makes sense to do this to prevent the server space being gobbled up, but modern phone cameras are producing much larger picture sizes, a portrait picture on an iPhone 16 is 4284 x 5712 for example, which is a proportion of 1.21 to 1
So what might be happening is that when the pictures are being downscaled, the proportions for portrait pictures that exceed the limit are being miscalculated and giving the 'squashed' result.
We can remove this restriction so that photos are not downscaled, but this will hugely impact space requirements as pictures will go from around 500kb or so to 3MB or more, which would have a significant cost implication for running the site.
What I can do is to increase the proportions of the restricted dimension 1.2 to one, or 1600 x 1400 to see if that will have the right effect without resulting in huge image sizes on the server
I'll check with Peter, the site owner, to see if he's happy with this approach.
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