How to fix square crop in Thumbnails gallery viewing style?

jfriend

When you end up with heads cut off in the thumbnail gallery viewing style, what can you do about it?

A long time ago, there use to be the ability to manually pick a thumbnail crop, but I don't see that option any more.

Allen

Smug refuses to fix this.
The crop tool was working great. The only problem is they ran a program every night at just after midnight looking for corrupt photos.
Any that were found were returned to version one. This also reset the crop.

I have thousands of thumbs reset going back 14 years.

jfriend

@Allen said:
Smug refuses to fix this.
The crop tool was working great. The only problem is they ran a program every night at just after midnight looking for corrupt photos.
Any that were found were returned to version one. This also reset the crop.

I have thousands of thumbs reset going back 14 years.

I contacted Smugmug support about this and they said there is no option any more for it. I complained loudly. The one thing they mentioned is that face tagging (if present in the metadata) should be taken into account in positioning the thumbnail crop. That does not seem to be working for me when tagging faces and then exporting from Lightroom 6. The thumbnail is still in the same wonky centered crop. I haven't gotten an answer from them on whether face data from LR6 is supposed to be supported or not? I've verified that face tagging is in the image EXIF, but Smugmug does not seem to be using it.

On a separate note, I've posted twice in the last couple days and seen you and Denise respond, but dgrin seems like a ghost-town now. Is it no longer used much? Are there better places to ask? I'm used to much busier times here back before the Smugmug site redesign (back when I was active here).

denisegoldberg

@jfriend said:
On a separate note, I've posted twice in the last couple days and seen you and Denise respond, but dgrin seems like a ghost-town now. Is it no longer used much? Are there better places to ask? I'm used to much busier times here back before the Smugmug site redesign (back when I was active here).

I'm not aware of another place to ask, and you're right, there is very little activity here.

Allen

They seem to have narrowed the photo thing to only faces. The rest of the world be dammed. What about all the other subjects that don't have human faces?

They are taking all control away from what the customer wants highlighted.

jfriend

@Allen said:
They seem to have narrowed the photo thing to only faces. The rest of the world be dammed. What about all the other subjects that don't have human faces?

They are taking all control away from what the customer wants highlighted.

If I could get the face data to actually work from Lightroom 6, then a work-around would be to manually assign a face to the area you want centered in the thumbnai (even if there was no face there) and then re-upload the image to Smugmug. An ugly, time-consuming hack, but there would at least be a work-around for the motivated. But alas, I can't even get the face data to work from LR6 (the only program I own that can embed face metadata). I'm still engaged with support and they want me to send me my face-embedded image where the thumbnail isn't respecting it.

I've read somewhere that Smugmug is considering a feature to allow you to specify the "center of interest" in the photo as guidance for when they make thumbnails (as a replacement for the thumbnail crop tool). If they allow you to specify a rectangular area to prioritize, then this might work, but would have to be treated differently in their algorithm than the face location metadata. If they just allow you specify a spot, they won't know if that spot should be centered or assumed to be a face and should allow for a body below the spot to fit into a thumbnail.

My guess is that they consider this notion more flexible than specifying a precise crop because they have situations where they may want to make multiple different shaped crops (both square and rectangular) depending upon the application and gallery viewing style and it's consistent with using face locations as guidance too. As another example of this same problem, I'm having a really hard time with the Gallery Cover Image which is a very nice feature for some galleries, but the crop is pretty extreme (wide and short) and again, we have no control over how the crop is made.

denisegoldberg

@jfriend said:
As another example of this same problem, I'm having a really hard time with the Gallery Cover Image which is a very nice feature for some galleries, but the crop is pretty extreme (wide and short) and again, we have no control over how the crop is made.

I don't know if this will help - it probably depends on the image you are using for the gallery cover image. Are you aware that you can slide the cover image up and down? I often find I can get a more acceptable cover image by moving the photo to expose a different part of it.

There is an icon in the top right corner that you can click to reposition the cover image.

Allen

So all those of us non-professionals that don't used Lightroom or such get screwed. I don't use "face" whatever.
I shoot birds, but any insect, animal, flower, landscape, etc. also needs to be able to zoomed in and cropped for a main subject.
I most times, need to pick out a tiny object out of multiple objects for the center of the crop.

Sounds to me they want to eventually remove the best style, Smugmug style.
Makes me sick that Smug refuses to use a thumbnail cropping tool that was working perfect.
14 years, 10's of thousands of thumbnail crops lost. What the CRAP!!!!!!!!

Above was about thumbnails. Image shows how even the small images on folder pages are broken for portraits.
Reported in another thread but ignored.

jfriend

@denisegoldberg said:

@jfriend said:
As another example of this same problem, I'm having a really hard time with the Gallery Cover Image which is a very nice feature for some galleries, but the crop is pretty extreme (wide and short) and again, we have no control over how the crop is made.

I don't know if this will help - it probably depends on the image you are using for the gallery cover image. Are you aware that you can slide the cover image up and down? I often find I can get a more acceptable cover image by moving the photo to expose a different part of it.

There is an icon in the top right corner that you can click to reposition the cover image.

I was not aware of that until my last correspondence with Smugmug support. That works pretty well. I found it a bit unintuitive that you have to click it first, release the mouse, then drag it. I don't know of any common interface like that. But, once you know how it works, it does work.

jfriend

@Allen said:
So all those of us non-professionals that don't used Lightroom or such get screwed. I don't use "face" whatever.
I shoot birds, but any insect, animal, flower, landscape, etc. also needs to be able to zoomed in and cropped for a main subject.
I most times, need to pick out a tiny object out of multiple objects for the center of the crop.

Sounds to me they want to eventually remove the best style, Smugmug style.
Makes me sick that Smug refuses to use a thumbnail cropping tool that was working perfect.
14 years, 10's of thousands of thumbnail crops lost. What the CRAP!!!!!!!!

Above was about thumbnails. Image shows how even the small images on folder pages are broken for portraits.
Reported in another thread but ignored.

I hear you. I was just thinking that there might be 3rd party tool that could let you put a face region wherever you want as a work-around. That certainly won't serve to let you zoom in on a small detail though like the old tool.

As it turns out the specific examples I gave to support don't work for them either so now they think the face region from LR6 may not even be working. They filed an issue with their internal QA department. Not that this is a solution for you, but even the feature they wanted to have doesn't seem to be working.