Before we begin on elaborating the Whys and the Whens, we will need to take a brief moment and discuss What is this feature and how it can help you and your website.
Opportunistic Smart Crop by imghaste, is a feature that can easily be enabled on imghaste dashboard as shown in the following image.
It will automatically identify the eye-drop image center and crop around this on a given new image dimensions.
Original image:
Regular Cropping:
Smart Cropping:
It will allow you to perform a crop center into both dimensions, in a way that your images will fit to width, as well as fit to height to offer you a agility and tiny error correction .
At the same time it will also try to crop by identifying the center of the content instead of the content center.
Smart cropping is useable in case you do not have a strict policy in regard of the image dimensions
Of course, smart-cropping is not a miracle maker. Nor will treat the assets of your websites the same way a professional graphic designer would do.
But it will certainly save a lot of precious time, perform minor corrections automatically to the content center and your visitors may not be experiencing any disoriented content across devices.
Since the beginning of the Web 2.0 standards – or even earlier..
People are struggling when it comes to updating a website/web-page with optimized content. Sometimes to reach perfections requires 2 or 3 times the same amount of effort.
That being said, wouldn’t it be amazing if you had a fuzzy tool to do part of the work for you in autopilot?
Now if you got thumbnails that are very small, such as 50×50 or less, it is not ideal to use smart crop functionalities, since there is room for error while trying to identify the content center.
This may lead in images to be visible in mobile devices (Retina screens 2x, 3x) only while it may fallback to your origin image when it comes to Desktop Devices.