I think this is more an indictment of how poorly some publications pick images than any sort of layout issue (or design decision). So probably a toggle throws the baby out with the bathwater. Saw a little cockroach and there was an article about a cockroach - okay, fair. Picture of what looks like a forest fire on an article about tuples - probably net negative.

The fact that some of the images are animated (presently: the "passport photos" associated with this story: <https://maxsiedentopf.com/passport-photos/>) is an absolute turn-off.

I'm often reading via an e-ink tablet. Whilst I can drop text quality to better support animations, the effect is a gross degredation of everything else, and of course, why the fuck would I want to see animations randomly?

"Animate on hover" is a setting I've long advocated for sites, and coded into CSS both for my own sites and as restylings of third-party sites. It's a compromise between constant distraction and being able to benefit from the very rarely actually useful animation. In the case of the passport photos story, the same effect could be achieved by a grid (2x2, 3x3) showing the variety of photos simultaneously. Detail isn't relevant, variety apparently is, and animation is a cheap eyeball-grabbing trick.

I saw the animation, but i was looking at the pdf i made - to offer a solution to another comment. No motion there; just meaningless images mixed with contextual images.