Uniformed thumbs and microthumbs - IMAGEMAGIK?

[KO_300D]

I'm getting on really well with the new EE and have found it easy to upgrade configure. There is one thing I'm not 100% about though and that is the look of the thumbs/microthumbs on the index page / exhibition pages.

I've noticed the new 'Fit in box' feature in the resize method options but am not quite sure how it is different to using the 'resize by longest edge' option.

What I'm looking for is probably more of an IMAGEMAGIK feature than EE coding, but if you look here Chromasia (http://www.chromasia.com/iblog/thumbnails.php) you will see that all thumbs are uniformed, but are also cropped to fit rather than being stretched to fit.
Under the current setup you can get the thumbs uniformed like the ones in Chromasia but they are stretched or compressed which I don't want

Please let me know how I can auto-crop thumbnails for a tidier looking indexpage

Thanks!
KO

[wkitty42]

i think that this may be what the new "fit in box" may be all about... the "longest edge" option does the stretch thing... look at it this way, if you set the longest edge for 64 and you upload two photos, one at 640x256 and the other at 256x640, what's gonna happen? on one the sides will be reduced by 10 and on the other the top/bottom will be reduced by 10... the problem is with the shorter edges... i've not yet played with the "fit in box" selection but i plan on doing so pretty soon as i have several photos that are of different sizes and, as you say, they do get squashed one way or the other... in fact, i think i'll go play with that, right now ;)

[KO_300D]

I'd forgotten that I posted this and just remembered as I decided to give it another go tonight! Has anyone yet come up with a way to crop thumbs/microthumbs tidily? I'd really like my index page to look as tidy as the forementioned site, as I'm sure would other users too?

Thanks
KO

[Pekka]

Cromasia site thumbs are hand cropped. I have on my todo list a crop feature on resize method, but that needs some logic planning so that it would be useful and handle mismatched crop sizes well.

Meanwhile, why not do the thumbs in PS and upload them with ftp. Just keep filenames identical. Then run size checker for thumbs to get the size data stored.

Or add in EE's Imagemagick thumb resize method an "extracommand" value

-crop 80!x80!+40+40

which crops 80x80 area which has top left corner at 40 pixels from the left and 40 pixels from the top. If you make the thumb size about 160x160 this will work depending on aspect ratio of images. If crop goes over the image will not be square so it's better to do it with safe values. See http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#crop for more.