I should imagine that the ability to manually create thumbnails for images would be a very common requirement. Currently, the only option with ImageCache is a preset scale-and-crop (with automatic centering), which is not good enough for a lot of images e.g. a tall and thin image of a person - you end up with just their stomach!

My current solution is to use the Image javascript crop module, which does the job, but it's quite a convoluted process, especially if you have lots of images. You have to navigate to the "Manage Images" tab, then for each image: click the thumbnail to go through to the image page, then click "Crop this image", then you get a window popup, then have to click "Click here to choose another crop area", then select the area, then click Crop, then close the window, then click save on the image page.

I'm half just posting this here so people are aware of the workaround, but it would be great if there was a more integrated/intuitive way of doing this.

Comments

karlitos’s picture

karlitos commented

Hi there,

I have created my thumbnails and did not have any troubles at all. How do you do the scale and crop action ion imagecache? In one action or two?

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Hi karlitos,
It doesn't matter how many actions you use - you can still only choose one horizontal and vertical offset which gets applied to all images. Centering works in a lot of cases but not all of them, meaning if you have different kinds of pictures, it is very likely some thumbnails will end up showing boring/undesirable parts of the original image.

karlitos’s picture

karlitos commented

The reason I was asking is because when I used two actions for scale and crop I wasn't getting the result I was expecting, however when I used only one action (just setting the width and hight) I got what I wanted. Doing it in one action the option for offset disappears....

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I don't think you understand the problem. There is no automated solution. I'm saying we should give users fine grained control over the thumbnail for each individual image, so they can take thumbnails from different regions for different images, depending on where the focus is. For example, in some images you may want to take a small square at the top, but for others, you may want a large area from the centre etc...

zengenuity’s picture

zengenuity commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

At this point, I won't be adding new features to the D6 version. If features are wanted for D7, please post a new issue.