By default, WordPress uses the center of an image when creating cropped thumbnails. SmartCrop attempts to find and use the most interesting part of an image and centers the cropping on that portion of the image.
This process is entirely automatic and cannot be manually controlled. There are other plugins out there if you wish to manually specify where you want thumbnails to be cropped.
Since this analysis process can be slow on large images, thumbnails are initially center cropped and later asynchronously regenerated to be smartly cropped. This avoids the uploading of new images from being slow. The one side effect of this however is that your browser may load and cache the centered thumbnail before it’s re-cropped.
Want to smartly crop your past image uploads? You can use my Regenerate Thumbnails plugin to trigger that. Make sure to uncheck skipping existing thumbnails.
Need Help? Found A Bug? Want To Contribute Code?
Support for this plugin is provided via the WordPress.org forums.
The source code for this plugin is available on GitHub.
Download & install the zip archive
The plugin package installer can be downloaded from the WP2E project tab called “code”.
1 – Select the version to download if this option is available otherwise the “latest” version of the main plugin will be used.
2 – After downloading the zip archive install the plugin package installer in you local environment and activate the script from the plugin list.
3 – Under the section “Plugins” of the admin dashboard you should see a new “Dependencies & Licenses” link. Follow the instructions from this panel to finalize the installation of the missing dependencies.
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- Give a name to your project
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- Download the Installer Package
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- Install & activate the plugin locally
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- Install the suggested dependencies
Tips: Use the WP2E panel to add/suggest new dependencies to the local installation. Press F5 in the list of dependencies if the changes are not displayed right away.