NOTE: This documentation page is outdated and has been moved to the new documentation guide pages under: https://www.drupal.org/docs/comparison-of-contributed-modules/comparison...

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.

Available modules

Name Installs Latest stable release D8 D7 D6
Imagefield Crop 29,313 2013-02 No Yes Yes
Manual crop 28,696 2017-12 No Yes No
IMCE crop 14,257 2013-12 No Yes Yes
Focal Point 55,822 2020-08 Yes Yes No
Smart Crop 7,994 2010-12 No Yes Yes
ImageField Focus 7,949 2011-11 No Yes Yes
Image javascript crop 6,199 2011-09
(RC only)		 No Yes Yes
EPSA Crop 6,016 2016-06 No Yes No
ImageWidgetCrop 35.999 2020-04 Yes No No
SimpleCrop 2,044 2018-05 No Yes No
Media Crop 983 2012-03 No Yes No
Image Focus 605 2013-01 No Yes Yes

Release dates and number of installs last updated February 2017.

Features

All modules are able to scale and crop.

Name Image field File field [2] User picture Media module 1.x Media module 2.x Fix aspect ratio Auto crop Responsive images [3]
Imagefield Crop Yes ? No No ? Yes No ?
Manual crop Yes ? [5][6] No Yes Yes Yes No Yes
IMCE crop ? ? ? No No ? ? ?
Smart Crop Yes ? Yes [1] Yes ? Yes Yes ?
ImageField Focus Yes ? ? Planned [4] ? Yes Yes ?
Focal Point Yes ? No No Yes Yes Yes ?
Image javascript crop Yes ? Yes Yes Yes Yes No ?
EPSA Crop Yes ? No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
SimpleCrop Yes ? No No No Yes No ?
Media Crop No ? ? Yes No Yes No ?
Image Focus Yes ? Yes Yes ? Yes Yes ?
ImageWidgetCrop Yes ? No N/A N/A Yes Yes Yes

Notes

Image Javascript Crop

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

Manual crop

Requires Libraries module and jQuery plugins imagesLoaded and imgAreaSelect to be installed.

Focal Point

Allows you to specify the portion of an image that is most important to be used when the image is cropped to prevent cut off on automated cropping.

Comments

dylanjorgensen’s picture

dylanjorgensen commented

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.

alanom’s picture

alanom commented

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.

alanom’s picture

alanom commented

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...

Elijah Lynn’s picture

Elijah Lynn
Location Portland, Oregon
commented

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!

MXT’s picture

MXT
Primary language Italian
Location Milan
commented

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.

bryancasler’s picture

bryancasler commented

Join the conversation about consolidating media cropping efforts.

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

aendra’s picture

aendra commented

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
News Developer and polynerd
http://www.aendrew.com

JKingsnorth’s picture

JKingsnorth commented

After a bit of testing I'm really enjoying the 'ImageField Focus' module, which seems to meet all my needs fairly simply!

ipwa’s picture

ipwa commented

Focal point is my favourite right now.

Nicolas
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dqd’s picture

dqd
(formerly "diqidoq")
commented

IMCE_crop is missing in the comparision and I find it a lil' bit confusing that we talk about media image field in the comparision. Do we talk about file_entity file field type:image here or about the abondoned media field?

Thanks to all for all the contributions and efforts here and everywhere else on Drupal.org!
You all rock! ~ dqd (formerly diqidoq)

doitDave’s picture

doitDave commented

Not sure if I am the only one facing this, however, the installation as of their README fails completely as the recommended libraries are not detected, even after manually renaming/changing the file/folder structures to match the recommendations.

I will also raise an issue, but still I want to share my experience which is far from "super cool and easy piece of cake"-ish.

dqd’s picture

dqd
(formerly "diqidoq")
commented

@doitDave: Did you read the BIG YELLOW BOX popping up when you press the "reply" button? It states what the comment section here should be used for. File an issue and start thinking about how community development works. Maybe this will bring you to the conclusion that your super cool and easy piece of cake"-ish comment is kind of ... let me prevent using the word... (BTW: module works as expected here.)

Thanks to all for all the contributions and efforts here and everywhere else on Drupal.org!
You all rock! ~ dqd (formerly diqidoq)

DrupalDope’s picture

DrupalDope commented

This overview of image cropping and resizing modules needs to be reworked to include information about whether these modules do really crop and resize (and hopefully also RESAMPLE, i.e. decrease quality to save space) the ORIGINAL files or only modify the styles of how the images are displayed.

Even when reading the module descriptions on the module pages it is often impossible to tell whether the module does the real thing or just tweaks image display styles.

Most of the above modules are more or less useless for reducing file size and optimizing images on sites featuring a lot of user-generated content.

A site with user-generated content needs the following:

- upload by user
- crop by user, optionally rotate
- temporary save on the server
- conversion to JPEG
- resize according to admin's specs
- resampling to 85% JPEG or whatever the admin wants to save space
- save file
- optional re-crop by user to set thumbnail area

hockey2112’s picture

hockey2112 commented

I agree 100%. Have you found a module that will allow the user to crop AND rotate? I can only find modules that do either/or.

DrupalDope’s picture

DrupalDope commented

I found nothing as of yet - I hope though that this is coming, because in my opinion, these are important functions and I feel that a single module should be in charge of handling all aspects of picture uploads, including downsampling the original picture to save storage space and bandwidth.

lias’s picture

lias commented

There's an alpha version for D8

https://www.drupal.org/project/imageapi_optimize