Please upload the screenshots on phabricator, that makes the review easier for the VDG.

Inlined the images for easier viewing.

To be honest, the submitted patch is with Qt::lightGray constant as per the suggestion above, but I think none of the predefined ones look nearly as good as the one in the screenshot which was a lighter version than Qt::LightGray (#c0c0c0). Alo hardcoding a color is not that big of a deal IMO.

+1 I like this. Looks good. Softer and more subtle.

Ugh, both don't look that neat to be honest.
But i would still prefer the old one over the softer one. The soft one looks too soft, specially with the tiny thumbnails in list mode, it looks like a weird white area (not as a shadow) while the old one did look like a shadow.

Could we compromise on something between the old version and the proposal?

I still prefer the old one over the new one.
-1.

Maybe the direction of the shadow can be changed, but nonetheless I still think that the current one is a bit too strong and especially noticeable on the smaller sizes.

So I completely agree with you that the shadow is too strong at small sizes, and overpowers the image. At larger sizes, I think it's an aesthetic judgment call. Could you try just changing it for the small sizes and see how that looks?

Thank for this, can you please share screenshots with dark themes, at least Breeze Dark?

+1

We removed the shadow entirely for small sizes in cf0052c2968a7c3e110e24134dbe7ef13c835995. So this change would just be for large sizes now. Do you think this is still needed?

According to the HIG drop shadows should be in Shade Black (#232627 35,38,39) https://hig.kde.org/style/elevation.html
Qt::lightGray sounds like it is something different?