The new thumbnail feature CSS Image Crop should solve all problems? Yes, it does! 🙂  While WordPress release the best image size or image for responsive design layouts we can’t wait and redesign our thumbnail dimentions with a option for ‘CSS image crop’.
The benefit is that we us the responsive image HTML code which WordPress is rendered, with src, size and srcset and make a crop with CSS for the outputed image. The difference between the WordPress concept and ‘CSS image Crop’ is, WordPress use best fitted sizes and ‘CSS image Crop’ do a fill with the shorter size and crop the rest of the image.
This is a very huge benefit because the image dimentions is so not depent on the used image size or best image which is rendered to the srcset. The image dimentions is so correct for width and height.
Do I lost WordPress functionality?
No! Another great advantage is that predefined image sizes do not matter here, but the best most appropriate image is loaded by the browser as it was written by WordPress in the responisve img attribute srcset and size. This means there is a real added feature that supports existing WordPress functionality to 100% and they only expands.
- This is good when there are already many images exists, in the upload directory.
- It is also good that no additional image size is generated and so many unnecessary images are generated.
Of course, it is possible under Settings> Media to produce per PlugIn or add_image_size () an additional image size, as suggested by Sanjayrath: WordPress.org support request “Feature image size”. Sanjayrath proposes to generate new images with your choosen image dimentions for existing uploaded images with a PlugIn, e.g. with ‘Ajax Thumbnail Rebuild‘.
- There is then no additional ‘CSS Image Crop’ code processed and rendered as HTML when an WordPress- or custom image size exactly matches with the setted image dimentions.
That sounds as you want even more.
What we want subsequent delivery is a drop down selection box that displays existing image formats and thus can fill in the values for image width and height dimention easier. A dropdown selection could be ‘WP best image’, ‘thumbnail’, ‘medium’, ‘Large’, ‘Custom sizes’, …
We feel here because it seems more confusing to users, which aren’t use and deposed there own image size. Much worser will be a misconfiguration. If an image size is selected, but not all images are in the present, it can easily lead to poor image quality. We work on it and will keep you up to date.
Do you use ‘CSS Image Crop’? We like to hear from you and your experiences.
Updated 2016-06-07:
We want to use ‘CSS image crop’ as default and not as option. Our estimation is that WordPress recommend to work with own custom image sizes when a workflow is desired. Only in this way the WordPress core classes ensure exact image sizes to present.
This workflow is not inhibited with our ‘CSS Image crop’. It is merely the image size are specified in our widget and we give the best most appropriate picture back – the custom image size.
Our widget will switch and doesn’t change the standard WordPress behavior, when this occurs: There is an custom image size with the same image dimensions as they registered in the widget.