EPSA Crop

Most Drupal admins will be familiar with the Imagecache module - it lets you manipulate images server-side by creating image presets. An image preset can mean, for example, that all images uploaded to the 'Article' content type are automatically resized and cropped to display as thumbnails within the article. This is a very handy feature, made even better by the fact that Imagecache made it into Drupal 7 core as the Image Styles module. Now Drupal 7 has this functionality out-of-the-box!

We use Image Styles on practically every D7 site we build, mainly to resize and crop images to specific dimensions so that they fit into the site's layout. However we often come across the following problem...

When cropping images, you must specify where the image is cropped to (e.g. the middle (default), top-left, bottom-right, etc.). This is normally fine for generic images like landscapes, but when you start uploading photos of people, you'll start to see chopped-off faces and the like; not very pretty.

Until a face detection feature is released for Drupal, we must manually specify how individual images should be cropped. This is where the EPSA Crop module comes in.

EPSA Crop is a great module (with a weird namespace) that allows Drupal admins to setup Image Style presets that implement the 'Crop Dialog' effect. In the settings for 'Crop Dialog', you enter the width and height of the crop area. You can then specify which EPSA Crop-enabled Image Style presets you want users to be able to use for each imagefield in your content types.

Now when a user uploads an image, they'll see a 'manage image crops' link. Clicking on this link opens a popup (see the screenshot above) where their image is displayed along with a list of the available presets for this imagefield. They can click on a preset, then highlight the part of the image they want to be shown in the final, cropped version.

As an admin, you can specify to display a cropped thumbnail in node teasers, and then a separate cropped preview in full nodes linking to a lightbox popup. That's one of the things I love about this module - the ability to specify different crops for the one image.

The interface is simple and intuitive (although I have noticed some intermittent issues in certain browsers). I highly recommend this module to anyone who needs more control over the cropping of their Image Styles.
You can read more information about the module, and download it, from the project page on Drupal.org: EPSA Crop