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Comparison of image cropping and resizing modules

Last updated April 12, 2013. Created by willmoy on June 5, 2011.
Edited by jcisio, joetsuihk, danbohea, Matthijs. Log in to edit this page.

These are modules that allow you to adjust an image after you have uploaded it, either to create a different style of the same image (e.g. a thumbnail) or simply to crop/resize or otherwise alter your main image.

Name Installs Since D7 D6 Image fields User pictures Media module Cropping Scaling Fix aspect ratio Auto crop
Imagefield Crop 18,942 Jan 08 Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes No
Image javascript crop 4200 Mar 08 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes ? No
Smart Crop 1944 Sept 10 Yes Yes Yes Yes [1] Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Image Focus 50 Jan 13 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
EPSA Crop 1339 Oct 09 Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
ImageField Focus 1144 Jan 11 Yes Yes Yes ? Planned Yes Yes Yes Yes
Manual crop 1425 Mar 11 Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Media Crop 110 Nov 11 Yes No ? ? Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Media Image Transform sandbox Planned Planned No ? ? Yes ? ? ? No

[1] - with imagecache_profiles module

Notes

Image Javascript Crop

Requires json2 and jquery crop libraries to be installed in sites/all/libraries

EPSA Crop

  • No upgrades from D6->D7
  • Just cropping, starts with a size you specify where you chose the area of the picture, but allows users to change the size and ratio of the area to use. However, you cannot alter the size of the underlying picture so if you need to pick a thumbnail size of e.g. 75x75, it will have to be a section that size from the original. That is, you cannot select a larger area and get it resized down.
  • Demo at http://www.aswissidea.org/

Manual crop

New, but positive comments: "Your module is amazingly simple and powerful, I’ve just finished trying everything that deals with this purpose for Drupal 7, and yours is the best by far. Can’t say thank you enough." (Here).

Comments

Manual Crop is Amazing!

Sometimes we forget how many people need simple solutions without bells and whistles. I was playing with all of crop modules but then this one just worked. Keep it simple and thanks.

My Drupal 6 Website - Ticket Cake

A few more notes:

After trying out some of these, hopefully this'll save someone some time:

Manual Crop: Seems the best. It doesn't have a demo yet sadly, but it should probably be the one you try first. It sets up two types of image presets (one for fixed aspect ratios, one flexible), giving you loads of flexibility, and has its own widget. The interface is great.
ESPA Crop: This can now be set to respect aspect ratios (table out of date). Also it does now do scaling. Nice clean interface, but the widget in the demo seems buggy in Drupal 7 - doesn't seem to work immediately after upload before changing page.
Image Javascript Crop: Very similar to Manual Crop, but with a less friendly interface (sizes from a drop down instead of resizing a box), and it appears to alter the default widget rather than providing its own (so theoretically it might clash with other modules that use the default image widget). Seems robust though.
Imagefield Crop: Now on Drupal 7, but unfortunately it seems not to use image presets at all - instead you fix the dimensions into each field. Therefore it doesn't play the expected way with everything else. Great interface though.
Media Image Transform: Still ? ? ? ? ? at time of writing... but Media module seems to finally being sorted out properly... so maybe it'll be ready in time for Drupal 9...

Smart Crop: The only one of these to really do something genuinely different, Smart Crop uses an algorithm to estimate the most interesting part of the image, and centres the automatic scale & crop around that. If it can be made to play nicely with any/all of the manual crop modules, it seems like a winning combination - an intelligent default with an optional manual override. Also, they're talking about implementing face recognition, which would be awesome.

Re-using existing crops

There's also one feature not in Manual Crop (yet) which is in Image Javascript Crop: the ability to re-use an existing manual crop in another image style preset. e.g. you could have a large-thumb, 120x120, and a small-thumb, 90x90, and rather than needing to crop both manually, you just crop the 120x120 once and have the small-thumb set to take that crop and scale it down.

It'd be great if some of these could merge and share the best features...

Has it now

Thanks for writing about this. I was just trying to figure out how to do this. Turns out it is the latest dev of manual crop, possibly earlier but I cannot confirm.

-----------------------------------------------
The Future is Open!

MEDIA FILE SELECTOR INTEGRATION

and it appears to alter the default widget rather than providing its own (so theoretically it might clash with other modules that use the default image widget). Seems robust though.

Image Javascript Crop is the only one at the moment that can support the "media file selector" widget from Media module.

This can be possible precisely because Image Javascript Crop doesn't provide it's own widget (so you can select the "media file selector" widget and THEN apply the cropping on the image selected trough the media selector).

With Manual Crop you actually can't do this: if you select its "crop" widget for an image, you can't select the "media file selector" widget (only one widget at once can be selected for a image field).

But they are working on this: see http://drupal.org/node/1491604

I think the best solution is that those module's maintainers join their effort to obtain sinergic results.

Join the conversation about

Join the conversation about consolidating media cropping efforts.

#1491508: A call for consolidating efforts. The path to a media integrated D7 cropping module.

Field collections

It should be noted that Manual Crop works with the Field Collection module. I tried Imagefield Crop and Image Javascript Crop, and neither seemed to work with it. Not sure about the others.

—Ændrew Rininsland
Drupal developer by day, data journalist by night
Data journalist by day, Drupal developer by night
http://www.aendrew.com

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