Intelligent thumbnails, imagecache, and so on

Hello,

I'm maintaining a couple of drupal sites where I try to make it as simple as possible for the contributor to add content. For example, when a person adds an article in the form of story content, they create a title, some body text, add an image, and a pdf file. The system takes this and with views and imagecache creates a snippet for the front page. The problem is, if I want to make imagecache make one shape for all the images, say, square, I run into a few problems. I could force it to crop smaller than the image so that there is image going to all sides of the square thumb, or I could make it crop so that the images have black borders on the top/bottom or sides depending on if the image was tall or wide. I'm not satisfied with either of these, not completely. The problem being that the contributor can't control where the crop will center. In imagecache I can of course tell it top, botto, center, left, right. That's still a bit too clunky. It forces me to either tell the contributor to be sure to use only pictures with certain characteristics, which in my opinion defeats the purpose of making it simple, or search for another option that will possibly give a more intuitive approach to cropping the image.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about and have an idea?

I'm sorry if this has been posted before, I tried my hand at searching. I'm happy with what these modules have enabled me to do, I'm just looking for a bit more. ;-)

This is the site I'm currently working on and the snippets in question are at the bottom of the front page for now.
http://pardubice.mska.cz

Thanks!