If you have a slideshow on your site, you will usually find that you want to resize and/or crop images to fit that slideshow best. Some slideshow software will automatically crop images that are too large, but they generally just crop equally from top & bottom and/or left & right, which isn’t always ideal.
Luckily, there are free and easy tools that make it easy to crop an image to a particular “aspect ratio” – that is, the correct shape.
The tool I find is easiest/most accessible is an online image editor called Pixlr – http://pixlr.com/editor/.
- Click “open image from computer” and upload the photo in question.
- Make sure the Crop tool is selected (the top left tool)
- In the second line of the top toolbar, where it’s labeled “Constraint” and will say “no restriction,” choose “Aspect Ratio”
- Enter either the aspect ratio, if you know it (e.g. 16:9 or 4:3), or if you don’t, simply enter the width and height of your sideshow images, in pixels (the tool will use these numbers to determine the correct aspect ratio). This will make the crop tool only able to crop in a shape that matches the aspect ratio of your existing slideshow images.
- Use your cursor to drag across the image, then adjust the position and size (drag corners to enlarge; hover tll you see a hand, then drag around to move position)
- When you’re happy, click Enter/Return, and say “yes” to applying the crop
- Go to File: Save and save it
- Re-upload the image to the media library