seriously, what's the deal with the image cropping

[Josh]

I can understand for the avatars, but for the threads it's nonsensical. If I'm trying to show what a particular beer bottle looks like, cropping the photo to an arbitrary square in the middle renders that impossible.

Is there some rationale behind this?

[Engineering]

It's not so much that, as that it's on the list as part of a general upgrade of the image handling features. But we haven't come to a decision about what, exactly, we should upgrade to, because the existing options aren't good.

[Chuckles the Clone]

As a suggestion, one goal should be that if someone uploads a valid,
CH-regulations-conforming picture, downloads that picture, and then uploads the result
again, that the two pictures that are uploaded should be exactly the same.

[Josh]

Not sure I understand the issue. Why not simply establish a maximum dimension for the full-sized image and use Imagemagick to scale it down after uploading. I've done that for sites I've built and it works great.

[Josh]

I guess this isn't high on the to-do list. ;)

[Robert Lauriston]

The original file for this JPEG image is 1203 x 902, 242KB.

The square thumbnail is cropped, as is the slighly larger square mouseover image, but the full image you get if you click on it is 520 x 390, which is proportional to the 4 x 3 original.

[Robert Lauriston]

The original of Josh's image is 120 x 274. It's getting radically cropped and enlarged to 520 x 390. Weird.

[Engineering]

We crop the smaller images for consistency in the topics, but we only resize the full-size image when you click on the thumbnail.

[Josh]

That's not true though. Clicking on the tiny image, which presumably would result in being able to view the larger image, presents a blown up version of the cropped image.

Check out my post on the Beer board about Full Sail Session Lager. This is the image that I uploaded with the post:

http://www.ratebeer.com/beerimages/47...

[kelvin8r]

Been trying to figure that out myself. My pics get severely cropped here. I post hundreds of pics on eBay every month, so it's not like I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm assuming that my previously posted pic files were too large. Next time I'll try to reduce the file to a pixel or so-maybe that'll do the trick!

[Engineering]

Then there is a bug, we'll look into it.

[Robert Lauriston]

That bug also affects avatar images. Upload a 105x105 image. It'll get cropped and resized back to 105x105.

[Chuckles the Clone]

A cumbersome workaround: in your favorite image editing application
add a 10-pixel border (I think it's 10 pixels) around whatever it is you're
planning on uploading. The cropper will remove the border, leaving what
you want.

(At least, for square images; I haven't experimented much with what's
going on with the rectangular damage.)

[Robert Lauriston]

A border deals with the cropping, but the system still enlarges the image, thus degrading it.