Understanding article image size & placement

I need a little help understanding the 'full' and 'small' image uses in the content, Latest and Most Read sections. I understand that the 'featured' articles are displayed on the 'home' page. The confusion is in understanding when the content image is large and when it is small.

The large image is sometimes displayed at the top of the page with the latest article in that category, and sometimes it uses the small image and what used to be the top article is pushed down the page by keeps it's large image rather than reverting to the small image. It appears that when an article is no longer the latest one, and therefore not displayed at the top of the page, it should be using the small image, with only the one at the top of the page displaying the large image; it just doesn't happen that way. I'm sure it is my misunderstanding, so that is why I am asking for clarification.

When I publish an article, I select a 150px wide small version of the image as the "intro" image, and a larger 650px version of the image as the "full image". Is this the correct thing to do to get it to work properly?

We are just starting with this template and want to get it right before we add too much content and have to redo things. For this reason we have stopped adding images until we understand this.

Thanks for the help

www.freespeechamerica.org

Maybe the fact that intro, leading and regular articles different rendering is what you try to understand?

Yes, we are trying to understand how the images are displayed by the template.

As we understand it, the 'full' image is displayed whenever the article is the 'leading' article (first article on the top of the page), and reverts to the 'intro' (smaller) image when the article is no longer the 'leading' article (no longer the first article on the page). This should happen regardless of what menu page it is assigned to.

Is our understanding correct?

We are finding that the artilce on the top of the page is sometimes the small image and that the articles that are no longer at the top of the page are still large. We don't understand what we are doing wrong, and that's where we need the help.

The 'small' (or 'full' image scaled smaller) is displayed in the "Latest" module column, and this always seems to work properly.

Thanks for your help.

www.freespeechamerica.org

You can control number of leading and intro articles in menu item settings

The Blog layout parameters are still setup like the demo and the installed template:
# Leading Articles = 1
# Intro Articles = 10
# Columns = 1

The same settings are on all the pages but the leading article does not always display the full image, and the Intro articles sometimes display the full image. Confusing.

Set them all to 0