On the home page or any “menu” page, how do I make the preview images a consistent size, as at the moment they are all different depending on the size of the featured image used.
One tip is to set the small, medium and large thumbnail settings for wordpress to match the sizes you’re using on home page and categories, found at:
wp admin > settings > media
but to “fix” existing images, you would likely need to run “regenerate thumbnails” plugin (I am actually doing this right now … myself since I started building pages without the front page setup, so now my pix on front page aren’t as deep as the right boxes ….!).
small = 100×65
medium = 700×357
large = 745×483
Hi,
What I’m currently trying to was crop the featured image, in order for the thumbnail to show as this cropped version. However for some reason crop doesn’t seem to work? Do you know why this may be?
What I mean exactly is that I want the preview thumbnail to be a part of the image that’s appropriate i.e a face not a torso, however the crop function isn’t working?
Sadly, the oooold timthumb and other thumbnail apps had “smart” cropping. It seems the thumbnail function built-in to WordPress (and used by all modern themes, except some legacy stuff) isn’t so smart. I just ran into this on client site where every photo would show people’s stomachs vs heads on the indexes with the fancy wide thumbs we were using, had to go back to “bloggy” square pix for the time being (ick!). This is nothing you can control right now such as “crop from top” vs “crop from middle” as far as I know.
Interesting, though. Wonder if WP *does* have this as a function hook. Hmm….. quick search on that. and … NOPE. It doesn’t have that function.
These folks tried to do a plugin for this issue, in the WP repository – VERY clever, when you upload image you can set the crop location/focus (!). This should be built in to WP, if you ask me 🙂
http://wordpress.org/plugins/thumbnail-crop-position/
For a more robust option, we have purchased this plugin to test as it mimics what the old photo plugins we had years back used to allow — no feedback from me on this one yet.
http://codecanyon.net/item/theia-smart-thumbnails-for-wordpress/3160252
(NOT an affiliate link!)
Hope that helped more 🙂
Thanks that plugin really does improve things. I find it astonishing that there isn’t an easier and more efficient way to do this though, surely this is a common issue??? Very odd.
Yeah. IN the old days theme developers had to use one of two plugins to do the thumbnails, or write custom hooks into server imagemagick libraries or similar. Then WordPress finally added thumbnail support “if you make it featured image” … and then all the theme devs stopped using the old plugins. We have one from 2006-2010 that let us specify the exact cropping and would pull from YouTube and stuff … huge memory hog, but we’ve always had our own server(s), so wasn’t issue. Also, for a long time the WordPress folks didn’t actually run any magazine or content sites beyond blogs, so it took years to add CMS features to the “blogging platform.” And there are still some really dumb things in there one should be able to fully turn off and remove, or do by default. “Crop direction” is a really needed thing for WP to add. Much like ability to grab thumbnail from first image in post regardless of “featured” or not. (Sigh.) Welcome to my world 😉
