New image cropping tool coming soon

November 25, 2009
by Pamela Agar

Those of you who were at the last web workshop earlier this year may remember that we were planning a new image cropping tool for the College CMS editor. I’m pleased to report that the tool is close to completion and due for release very soon.

The image manager is the first in a series of improvements we’re planning for the College CMS editor. In this development, we want to make it much easier for you to upload and resize images in the CMS – and ensure that pictures within your pages are accessible and quick to render.

With the new tool, you’ll be able to upload pictures, select the size you want and crop or adjust the image area. The tool will then optimise the photograph for the web, so your pages will load more quickly, and finally add it to your webpage with the correct styles and alt text.

The tool has been developed by a team made up of staff from Communications, ICT and the Faculty of Natural Sciences. We’re doing final testing now and I’ll confirm the release date in the next few days…

 

This entry was posted on November 25, 2009 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

 

 

4 Responses to “New image cropping tool coming soon”

  1. March 10th, 2011 at 5:28 pm Web Forum-For College website owners to keep informed, contribute and share ideas. The new image cropping tool is live! says:

    [...] New image cropping tool coming soon 3 comment(s) | 5503 view(s) [...]

  2. November 28th, 2009 at 10:03 am Phil Wilson says:

    Thanks for the detailed reply!

  3. November 27th, 2009 at 5:06 pm Karsten Seipp says:

    Hi Phil,

    Glad you like the Image Crop Tool. It is our own development and works similarly to the link you sent, but it has a Flash front-end (to create all the settings) with a php back-end (to resize the image, backup a hires version and write the images into the Oracle DB etc). In addition to cropping you can also resize the image, even blow it up if it is too small (will be sharpened if necessary), move it around and when you have finished editing it, the image is written back into the HTML code with the right CSS classes applied to it using JS.
    You can even go back to your article and then re-edit the image at any time if it still needs changing after you have published it. Altogether it is a quite adventurous approach, but it works very well on all systems/browsers. It is a very useful app which I hope will benefit a lot of people. It actually makes cropping and resizing fun!
    We’ll be posting a how to guide and demo video when we launch the new tool – so you can see more then.

    Karsten
    Web Designer/Developer

  4. November 27th, 2009 at 2:23 pm Phil Wilson says:

    Fascinating! Are you using something like http://odyniec.net/projects/imgareaselect/ ?

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