Automatic Cropping of the Featured Image

Rachel left a question in the comments of my previous post that would, in summary, sound a bit like this:

I’m doing a photoblog (or attempting), and I’m having some trouble. Basically what I want to do is be able to pick one area of the image for the featured crop and/or zoom. That way something different, or at least something at all is expressed by the featured image, and that expression is at least consistent with the feel you get from seeing the whole image. An example of this problem? I have a picture of a guy on stilts, twirling a fire stick. The whole image is great, the lighting has a great feel. But the featured image?? Crops to his torso, so you can’t see any of the action of the photo. Is there a way to fix this, or control where or what the featured image crops or zooms to?? Thank you!!!

Now, I didn’t encounter this problem before because I didn’t need to upload HD images to the blog, and since Rachel didn’t leave a link to her blog, I made an effort and found something appropriate. Bear with me as we go a long way around this issue.

I wanted to show the problem Rachel encountered so that other readers have an idea. But first I had to change the category of my featured posts under Theme Options > Featured Category so that the old post goes away from the top spot of the home page.

Here you can see what happened when I left it completely to WordPress.

OK, you get the picture. That’s what WordPress.com Structure Theme does to featured images in order to display them on the home page – and it’s wrong.

Now, I tried to go into the gallery, crop the image the way I wanted it and save it within the gallery under a different name. Then, this pre-cropped image would be my featured image and all will be well in the world. Not bloody likely.

Because, you see, you can’t save the image you edit within WordPress under a different name, you just end up saving the existing image with the changes you made, so you lose whatever you wanted to display in the first place. This made me angry, but then I noticed I didn’t lose what I wanted to display in the first place, the image still stayed in the post and I could still link to the full version. The cropped version was the only one left in the gallery though, so I couldn’t edit the original version any further, but hey, once I crop the featured image, who cares.

And this didn’t even work with my clown, but with another image (of the Punisher). For the clown image it just said “Unable to save the image”. So I went ahead and cropped the clown in IrfanView, and then uploaded it separately, all the time praying that I can make this my featured post once I’m finished, and this is what basically happened.

And then, IrfanView, nicely cropped just what I wanted:

Upload, set as featured image aaaaaand…

The featured image looks the way I want it to look, I still have the full image somewhere up there in this post… I just had to go a long way around to get it.