Thread:Digifiend/@comment-188432-20160727153923/@comment-188432-20160918021943

Heya again :) If I understand the request, you want Wikia engineers to write you software that will automatically crop from portrait into widescreen. Well, I don't wanna lie to you: that's just not going to be possible.

But the thing is: it wouldn't even be desirable. That's such a radical change of aspect ratio that an automated attempt would almost certainly crop out interesting bits you would manually choose to keep.

Optimal results come only from humans eyeballing the crop, one at a time.

That said, I can give you a range of aspect ratios (ARs) to shoot for so that you can make the best choices for yourselves:
 * Portrait images need to have an AR no less than .5. The reason BoomTrini.jpg is soooooo long is because it has an AR of .3. Put another way, its length is three times its width, which is simply outside the bounds of our image handling code. An ideal portrait AR is around .75 -- but anything from .5 to .9 will work on the desktop and within Mercury, and still appear as an upright rectangle.  So BoomTrini.jpg simply needs to be re-cropped, manually.
 * For widescreen images, aim for the traditional aspect ratio of western theatrical films, and you'll be fine. Anything over an AR of 1.88 will actually work, so I'm not suggesting you should have to go recut all your images. But if you find one that doesn't work, here's an easy formula to remember when you're attempting your repair:
 * Divide your width by 2.35 to discover the proper height.
 * So, if you have a pic that's 400 wide, divide by 2.35 and you'll find that your height needs to be 170. If you crop to those dimensions it'll always work, in both Oasis and Mercury.

If manually re-cropping your images scares you, don't let it. It's probably not going to be as massive an issue as you currently imagine. ListFiles is a nifty bit of code that you can add to your local JS which will list your images by a number of qualities -- two of them being width and height. If you want to see a running example, jump over to tardis:ListFiles. I think we might need to change it slightly to make it super useful to you, in that we'd need another column for AR (width/height). This would quickly highlight all your <.5 AR images, and thus define the exact scope of your work.

If I've totally misunderstood what you're trying to accomplish, accept my apologies and please ask again. I want to try to get you the best solution possible.