Adjusting the Crop of a Folder Thumbnail?

Darter02

I can't seem to find a way to adjust the crop of a folder thumbnail. I'm redoing my homepage. I've my top-level thumbs on display. I want to adjust the way the feature image is cropped.

Does anyone know how to do that?

Allen

I'm confused, I don't see anywhere that NewSmug uses thumbs except in a Smugmug style
gallery (style I'm using). For folder grid layouts they now use a gallery photo squared in
the middle.

I created my own "thumbnail"/photo to feature with my special crop.
I selected a photo and cropped it square and put it in a gallery "Gallery Featured Images"
and featured from there. Did a few but lots of work that shouldn't be too bad going forward.

Darter02

On my homepage, which is here, you'll see how I've placed my top level folders along the right side. What I want to do is be able to adjust the crop of the feature image for each thumbnail. I don't want to have to create a hidden gallery of precropped thumbs, that is unless I HAVE to. On the old smugmug we had a very nice thumbnail cropping tool. I used it all the time. Now? eh...

Darter02

Here's another conundrum I just discovered. My site should look look one way, but my wife's browser (ie8 - booo!) renders the thumbs another way. I'm not talking about the rounded corners either. The crops are entirely different than on all other browsers. I even tried my site on Screenfly, in all sizes and didn't see this appear. It must be something to do with IE8.

This is on IE 10. The crops all appear as close to how I want them as possible.



This is on her work PC. The crops are all way off. I don't understand why.



What I need is to be able to manually set those thumbnails to the crop I want. Right now all I can do is choose an image that sort of works. This is not an effective means to do it.

Darter02

I just finished fixing this problem. I had to create a special image for each folder, cropped in a 3:1 aspect ratio. I then created a hidden gallery and pointed each folder to render a specific image for its thumbnail. It looks a lot better, but was a lot of work. P.I.T.A.

Homepage is here.

einat

This is something that was possible in old SM, the feature photo for galleries and categories had the same customized crop as it did in the gallery's thumbnail.
What Allen suggested seems to be the only work-around.
But if I want to change featured photos every once in a while - then I have extra work in photoshop, which was not neede before.

Darter02

Amen to that. It took a few hours to create mine. I had to find the original files in the archive, and then I ended up reprocessing them from scratch for the most part. Uploading to this site also is wonky and seems to want to crash a lot. Then you have to WAIT for things to process on SM. Then go through a bunch of steps to select the images. A real P.I.T.A..

Allen

Darter02 wrote: »

... I had to find the original files in the archive, ...

Were these not just photos from the gallery? I did a quick download of each to get the original before
cropping and uploading the featured image.

Darter02

I chose to go for the originals. One image is from a series I shot in 2008 that isn't on my site yet. Since setting up this site at the end of 2011 I've been redoing ALL my old work before uploading to it. There's a gap between 2008 to 2011. I also wanted complete control of how they looked in a 3:1 aspect ratio. I'm old fashioned and process in ACR, so I wanted ensure things like the crop factor, sharpness, temperature, gamma, and and vignetting was as I wanted. All subtleties, but I guess that's how I roll.