Firstly, I have done my research as thoroughly as I possibly can. Searches have been made, but I have not found any advice or solution as to my exact issue.
Ok, time to explain.
Currently I am working on a gallery theme for a client (I am not the original developer of this theme, it was created by another developer in the office). The theme is rather simple, the home page displays 220×170 thumbnails of each post containing an image. Click on the image, page with full size image comes up. Simple enough.
Now my trouble starts. The client would like to define which area of the image is displayed in the 220×170 thumbnail as currently WordPress just centers the image. My process to do this has been to upload the image to the gallery, insert into post and save.
I will then click on Set Featured image. The main problems begins here. There’s 2 ways I can go about this, both causing issues. If I crop the image, select Apply Changes to: Thumbnail, save it and then select Use as featured image, the featured image remains the full sized image, just resized to fit the 220×170 size.
At first I thought I figured out a solution, but I’d call it more of a band-aid fix and my client would rather avoid this next way. If I crop the image, instead now using All image sizes, this will now set the correctly cropped image as the thumnbnail, but will obviously overwrite … all the image sizes. So if I got back into my post (let’s say I accidentally deleted the image from the post) and I wanted to insert it back in, the image now inside of the gallery is the cropped image.
I’m trying to look for some guidance as to how I can fix the first issue, where the cropped thumbnail does not display in the featured image section, but rather just the full sized image.
Thank you,
2 Answers
It sounds as if your client is savvy enough with an image editing program.
Just thinking out loud here, but you could add a custom meta box and have the client upload 2 images. 1 – The smaller image that puts the focus where they want it 2 – The large image, to be used as the “Featured Image”.
Then call the custom image in the theme and the large image on click. I know it is an extra step for the client, but this is a method I have used in the past for a similar situation.
