Images to scale or crop and aspect ratios

These are some help diagrams to assist people in understanding the basic image operations we can do with image cache styles.  There are lots of subtle things we can do, but the bulk of the decision always comes down to whether we should scale or crop.  The balance is this:

  • If you scale, you will never lose parts of the image, but you will get padding on your images.
  • If you crop, you will never get padding, but you will lose parts of your images.
The diagram below illustrates what happens as you force one aspect ratio into another aspect ratio
Scaling vs cropping

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