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.

    Images can be resized
    Can it be used to arbitrarily resize an image?
    srcset generation
    Does the service automatically generate srcset for images?