Over the past few months, I have been intermittently working on a few modifications to my photo album software here at the site. The only change I have pushed out to the site so far is moving my favorites to their own dedicated tab. Another change that I'm still pondering is a modification to the aspect ratio for photo album previews. Here's an example of the change I'm thinking about making:

The example on the left shows an album preview block as it appears on the site today, while the example on the right shows how I plan to make the preview image larger (please ignore the color differences). Today, each album's preview image is a 16-to-6.4 ratio image (250 x 100). This tight ratio makes finding a usable preview image harder than it should be. I'm thinking about changing the preview to a 16-to-9 ratio (roughly 250 x 140). Using this alternate ratio, should help make preview photos stand out a bit more, and will make it easier to select nice looking images. The down side to this change, however, is that is will push content farther down the page (not to mention the slightly longer load times for the larger images).

Do you have an opinion on which is better?