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Introducing WP SmartCrop – Intelligent, Responsive Image Cropping for WordPress

I’ve been taking another look at old code recently, and I dusted off a couple on-the-fly smart cropping demos that I wrote, years ago. At the time, they relied on questionable hacks and ran extremely slowly, making them impractical for real-world use.

However, with the rise and widespread adoption of CSS3, and the recent incorporation of Responsive image srcsets into WordPress 4.4, The timing seemed right to finally complete the toolkit, and offer WordPress users truly responsive images.

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WP SmartCrop is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to specify a ‘focal point’ for the images you upload.  Then, when the image is used in a post, or as a featured image, it will automatically crop the image to any dimensions set by the site’s stylesheet.

With this new feature, you can (for the most part) decouple your media from your design, without sacrificing the impact it has for viewers.

2 Comments

    • gschoppe's profile image.

      Hi Matt, the plugin is currently owned and maintained by Bytes.co. As for getting it working with a theme’s featured images, I recommend checking to make sure that the theme is using the standard the_post_thumbnail() or get_the_post_thumbnail() functions to output the featured image, and check that the image size is set to ‘full’ or another non-cropped thumbnail size inside that function. Custom image output functions and cropped thumbnail sizes are the most common reasons for smartcrop to fail.

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