alt Hacker NewsMasonry layout fixes one of the dimensions. That means either portrait or landscape images will look visibly smaller than those of the inverse aspect ratio, because their longer side must be the same length as the latter’s shorter side.
Masonry works well if you have different aspect ratios of the same orientation.
Just curious, what algorithm is good for laying out images of arbitrary orientations, sizes, and aspect ratios? That seems like a pretty difficult problem. Some sort of variation of knapsack problem maybe?