That is sad. I totally get that it may be such for page optimizations on mobile devices as well as to reduce server workload, but it is definitely a step back into the 1990s internet. The images should be larger and not squeezed into a square.
It’s also partially a design consideration, in that families tend to upload photos in a variety of dimensions. We could make for bigger pictures, but we’d still experience either squeezing or cropping of some sort.
Couldn’t there just be a max width and max height dimension and the photo just sizes to match one of those?
That’d work for the image, but it would break the page flow in whichever dimension isn’t met. We have this problem on pbbg.com:
You can see how although DragonRip’s aspect ratio is preserved, it goofs things up for the wider group of elements. It’s not horrible, but then, neither is squeezed or cropped images.
We could work around that too by centering the image, but with our family pages in particular even that could cause weird issues with the image’s vertical margins. 
Keep in mind too this all has to look right across all screen sizes.
The only way to both preserve the image and its effect on the page’s design is to enforce a specific aspect ratio prior to uploads. I’m not against doing that, but it isn’t much of a priority atm.
I liked that fam 
Agreed, I much prefer the widescreen format too.
When I saw “family photo issues,” I thought of a family having a bad day at Sears, the dog won’t behave, the kids got their nice clothes dirty, the parents look 20 years older than they are.
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Almost relevant:
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