Not playing nice with WP Smart Crop?

Hi,

It’s way too complicated to handle separately all the cropping plugins… those are too specific, as cases.

Why don’t use the internal WordPress cropping features? They work with the plugin and are fully integrated in the WordPress API ??

Hi Jordy,
i have same problem and WP crop is not a solution as i’m uploading full image and i can crop it in different ways depends from place used and with standard WP crop i can’t really choose which format is cropped – at least if i’m not mistaken.
So this would be great to solve somehow as then there would be no need to upload many versions of same image.

You appear to be missing the point Jordy. We are not talking about things that can be achieved using internal WordPress features.

Plugins like WP Smart Crop, aren’t tools for manually cropping images (like the built-in WordPress tools you suggest using), they just add the ability to let WordPress know what parts of a picture shouldn’t be cropped out of the picture when WordPress automatically crops images to adapt them to all the various image formats defined for a website (by WordPress and the theme).

All regular WordPress auto-cropping is done based on the center of an image, even if the center of an image is completely empty. And that’s a problem in many cases. A widescreen image with critical content on the left/right side that is auto-cropped by WordPress to a square format might end up not featuring the critical content at all. And a full-figure photo of a person that is auto-cropped to a widescreen or square format might end up cropping away the head of the person.

Until WordPress itself adds the ability to define protected areas for images that are preserved when WordPress automatically adapts images to the various formats featured on a site, we need third-party extensions to allow us to define such areas.

Using a plugin like WP Smart Crop we can avoid auto-cropping away the most critical portion of images, which works like a charm for the regular size/resolution images. But the retina version of the images completely ignores how the regular images are auto-cropped and does the regular dumb centered cropping with no regard to the actual content in the images, so the retina images end up with bad crops in many cases.

So if we turn off the?retina plugin for the site all images are then smartly cropped, but as soon as the retina plugin is activated we end up with headless people and so on, because the retina plugin doesn’t play nice with this much-needed feature (that pretty much appears to simply be modifying the mathematical center coordinates of an image to reflect another portion of the image as the “center”).

And it absolutely sucks not being able to have both smartly auto-cropped images and retina versions of the smartly cropped images.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by kellermandesign.

Hi,

I totally understand the issue; the problem is that it seems like this plugin you are using is not updating/maintaining the crop data in a standard way, so basically, if you disable the plugin, all your crop data is gone. What it does is great, but I don’t see why it’s not updating the crop data, which would be used not only by my plugins but by all the other plugins out there as well.

In the core.php of the plugin, there is a resize function. In it, you will find a section about custom crop, so you can see that it is actually applied.

If there is a better way to handle this, of course I am interested, maybe you could add the developer of that other plugin to have a quick look at this thread in order to let us know what she/he thinks is best?

Thank you Jordy,

I’m a designer with limited insight on the coding/tech stuff so thank you for your input. And yeah, if it’s WP Smart Crop that needs an update to make it play nice with Perfect Images + Retina I’ll see if I can get somewhere on that end.

Meanwhile, if you/anyone know of another smart crop/focus point plugin that already does work in a way that is compatible with Perfect Images + Retina, please let us know.

Cheers!

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by kellermandesign.

Turns out we contacted the WP Smart Crop developer four months ago, but still no reply.

Today we found another plugin that for some reason isn’t available on www.ads-software.com/plugins, Theia Smart Thumbnails, and will explore this option as well.

Please check out the demo/tour in the link above, and try moving the focus point around for the five demo images to see the importance of being able to set a focus point.

And Jordy, since you are a serious developer that have been keeping your plugin up to date for years and have lately been adding more features to it, please consider adding in focus point functionality as well. That would be so great – even as a Pro option.

Cheers!

for what it’s worth, this issue is also crushing my soul at the moment. in my case the plugin is “Crop-thumbnails” which is GREAT, but the lack of compatibility or any way to integrate with Perfect Images may lead to me needing to disable the latter. we simply can’t have those awkward thumbnails on the site we’re building.

i will keep looking for a solution though. @kellermandesign did you have any luck with the Theia Smart Thumbnails plugin?

For your information, there is a custom crop filter in my plugin, called “wr2x_custom_crop”.

If another plugin (like a cropping plugin) hooks on it, it could indicate the custom crop it does by providing an array like:

[x => ?, y => ?, scale => ?, w => ?, h => ?]

The signature of the filter is:

apply_filters( 'wr2x_custom_crop', null, $mediaId, $sizeName )

Size name is basically thumbnail, large, etc…

This crop information is actually the one used by the image resize system of WordPress, I am just providing a way here for other plugins to indicate that information.

In short, those plugins can implement the

hey @tigroumeow! thanks for the information. i think maybe your message got cut short though?

i’ve got all the cropping data you mentioned (although slightly different, it includes x, y, x2, y2, w & h) from the plugin and a hook that i can fire off, but i’m not sure how to use your filter to leverage this cropping data for the retina versions of images. maybe it was in the rest of the message? lmk what your thoughts are.

and we’ve been pro users for the better part of a decade now, if that matters ??

Hi @martinparets,

There is no filter for that yet, but I can add it ?? And then you could try to return the right crop information to it? That would be awesome.

Can you contact me here?
https://meowapps.com/contact/

I will add the filter and then we’ll try to make it work together.