Focused Image Cropping with smartcrop.js

By  on  

Images tend to make any page more engaging, especially when done right.  The problem is that automating image creation and sizing can be a very difficult task, especially when the image is uploaded by a user -- who knows what format, size, and resolution the image will be.  Hell, who knows if they're actually sending you an image for that matter (though validating that they've uploaded an image isn't too difficult).

I recently found out about smartcrop.js, a brilliant JavaScript utility which analyzes the contents of an image and finds the focal point (a face, for example) of any image.  It's easy to use and does an outstanding job picking up on the important part of an image.

Check out a few images I put through the smartcrop.js testbed:

I wont bother showing the super simple code sample -- you can view that on the smartcrop.js repo.  And be sure to play around on the testbed.  I love recognizing developers for their feats and this is some incredible work by Jonas Wagner!

Recent Features

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Google Font API

    Google recently debuted a new web service called the Font API.  Google's Font API provides developers a means by which they may quickly and painlessly add custom fonts to their website.  Let's take a quick look at the ways by which the Google Font...

  • By
    MooTools 1.2 Image Protector: dwProtector

    Image protection is a hot topic on the net these days, and why shouldn't it be? If you spent two hours designing an awesome graphic, would you want it ripped of in matter of seconds? Hell no! That's why I've created an image...

Discussion

  1. Fred

    Excellent find, thank you.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!