Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):

I would like default photo positioning to decide at rendering time for a desktop display whether an image in a Wikipedia article should appear on the right (default) or the left (when the right-hand-side of the display is in use by infoboxesand that this option should be the default.

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):

On Wikipedia, there are frequently very large infoboxes on the right-hand side of an article. This creates issues for positioning photos related to text that is rendered to the left of the infobox. Currently we get the options of left or right (default) positioning for photos, so people mess around manually setting photos to be left or right until it looks perfect when it renders on their screen using their settings (whether they be Wikipedia preferences or their computer display settings). People also shift photo directives earlier in the article body so they render beside the relevant text (again, as they perceive it on their screen). Unfortunately Wikipedia gets rendered on a wide range of screens, so careful manual positioning on one person's screen produces a bad result on another. So other people come and change the left/right to make it "better", and this repeats as everyone is seeing a different rendering. Also there is the use of the clear template to try to force the display of all of the photos of a section before the next heading is rendered. This is a waste of a lot of contributor's time when nobody can get it right. Deciding the position of photos (left or right or delayed) at render time would be a much smarter idea.

I note that there are other boxes that appear on the RHS of the screen that create similar problems, but I don't know internally how easy it is to detect these other box types and judge they are large enough to impact on photo placement. So my request is for a solution either just for infoboxes (being a very common large RHS box) or extended to all boxes as is expedient in terms of a solution.

An extension of the idea would be to delay the rendering of the next paragraph or heading until all photos positioned next to text in the previous paragraph/section have been rendered to retain the relationship between article text and photos.

A variant of delaying the next heading would be to wrap any remaining photos (beyond the end of the text body in the previous section into a horizontal gallery), then render the next heading. That would be appropriate if a section's text ended with 2 or more photos still be rendered.

Benefits (why should this be implemented?):

Contributors would stop wasting time getting the rendering "right" when it's just not possible for them to achieve this.

Readers would get a more readable article with better relationship between text and image. When images have not been captioned (yeah, I know they should be, but not everyone does), it can be easy to get confused into thinking an image is associated with the adjacent text, when in fact it relates to earlier text (misleading the reader).

As I rarely use the mobile interface, I make no suggestion in relation to it.