This is a screenshot of an update to WP Post Thumbnail WordPress plugin I’ve been working on lately. I’m in the process of testing it and hope to wrap it up before the end of the month.

Besides bringing WP Post Thumbnail up to WordPress 2.7, some major changes includes:

• Uploading images are now through WordPress own built-in media library. WP Post Thumbnail v0.2 scans through the media library for supported image type files and list them out. Bloggers then choose an image to crop. By retaining each thumbnails source image in media library, bloggers can easily go back, find source images and recrop thumbnails.
• Uses DeepLiquid’s “jCrop” jQuery javascript cropping plugin (Michal Wojciechowski’s “imgAreaSelect” was used in the current WP Post Thumbnail 0.1.8). This is to take advantage of jCrop’s Explicit Sizing Method to handle large images. In WP Post Thumbnail 0.1.8, large images are simply resized to fit the container but the cropping mechanism is not scaled according. With jCrop’s Explicit Sizing Method in WP Post Thumbnail v0.2, we are able to resize large images smaller and the cropping mechanism scales according.
• Bloggers are given a few options to configure their default thumbnail. In the WP Post Thumbnail v0.2 settings page, you can configure jpeg_quality, default thumbnail’s width and height. In the “Edit Post” section, bloggers can override the default width and height as well as float left or right options for each post. Therefore unlike the current WP Post Thumbnail 0.1.8, bloggers can choose to display default thumbnail in various ways …

More updates soon …

One major problem I’ve yet to rectify is cropping very large images. For instance, when cropping huge images shot using a Nikon D80 SLR (10 megapixel, 2MB or greater filesizes) I had to tweak php.ini to increase memory_limit to 64M. Currently, I’m using GD to resize images. Would ImageMagick be better and more memory efficient compared to GD? Also is ImageMagick installed in your web hosting? Please advice!