Alex Mills

<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Want to smartly crop your past image uploads? You can use my <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/" rel="ugc">Regenerate Thumbnails</a> plugin to trigger that. Make sure to uncheck skipping existing thumbnails.</p>
<h4>Need Help? Found A Bug? Want To Contribute Code?</h4>
<p>Support for this plugin is provided via the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/smartcrop" rel="ugc">WordPress.org forums</a>.</p>
<p>The source code for this plugin is available on <a href="https://github.com/Viper007Bond/smartcrop" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a>.</p>


SmartCrop

Instead of cropping to the center of an image, SmartCrop attempts to use the most interesting part of the image for the thumbnail.

Bytes.co

gschoppe

<p>WP SmartCrop allows you to set the ‘focal point’ of any image, right from the media library, then crops your images to match your css rules <em>(no more squished aspect ratios)</em>, keeping that focal point, not only in view, but as near as possible to a ‘rule of thirds’ position in the image.  The results are powerful, composed photos at any screen size, with any constraints.</p>
<ul>
<li>Visually select your images’ focal points with an intuitive click-based interface</li>
<li>Quickly enable or disable smart-cropping on a per-image basis.</li>
<li>Easily target only the images you want to style, with the <em>img.wpsmartcrop-image</em> selector</li>
<li>Automatic image preloader, so your users never see partially loaded images again</li>
<li>Semantic HTML5/CSS3 for modern browsers, with automatic fallback to non-semantic HTML4/CSS2 for older browsers.</li>
<li>Lightweight and fast processing of images, even inside post content</li>
<li>Fully compatible with common caching and optimization plugins and solutions, such as W3 Total Cache, Wordfence, WPEngine’s EverCache, Better WordPress Minify, and Google’s PageSpeed Module.</li>
<li>Lets you take full advantage of the new responsive srcset features added in WordPress 4.4, to make the most of your images.</li>
<li><strong>NEW!</strong> Legacy support for existing cropped thumb sizes allows you to see improvements, right out of the box, without changing your CSS!</li>
</ul>
<h3>Compatibility</h3>
<p>WP SmartCrop has been fully tested in the following browsers:</p>
<ul>
<li>Safari</li>
<li>Chrome</li>
<li>Firefox</li>
<li>Microsoft Edge</li>
</ul>
<p>This is by no means an exhaustive list of supported devices; it just represents our primary target platforms.</p>
<h4>Please Rate/Review and Enjoy</h4>
<p>Your Ratings and Reviews help us to direct our development, and help other users know what to expect.</p>


WP SmartCrop

This function should be a core functionality! So when I found this little gem I was so happy.

A small but significant improvement to WP

WP SmartCrop will crop your images on-the-fly to match your CSS, keeping the main focal point in view.

SmartCrop vs WP SmartCrop