images.tooling.report

"Smart" cropping

Can important parts of the image be automatically detected to crop images in a more aesthetically pleasing manner?

a child looking into a telescope, pointed upwards

Introduction

Editorially cropped images are essential for photos on modern sites, but can quickly become burdensome to maintain if images are added with any kind of frequency. Form factors can quickly fall through the cracks, leading to well intentioned, but poor performing user experience. Being able to automatically create editorial crop photos is an amazing time saver, and a wonderful addition to any image optimization service.

The Test

Testing was an examination of documentation for each service to see if an automated form of editorial cropping was an available feature. If it did exist, its functionality was confirmed.

Conclusion

akamai
bigCartel
cloudflare

You can manually create the functionality via Cloud Workers

cloudinary
ecwid
fastly
goDaddy
imageEngine
imaginary
imgix
imgproxy
optimole

Optimole offers smart cropping, but you need to enable it within settings

shopify
shortPixel

The functionality is offered by an additional plugin to WordPress from the same plugin author

smush
squarespace
thumbor
webflow
weebly
wix

Wix allows you to edit the focal point of an image on your page, that it automatically has selected, based on different breakpoints being used.