Post Featured Image Block: Consider adding a focal point picker

[annezazu]

This feedback came up as part of the FSE Outreach Program's All Things Media exploration:

Around 13:30 I created my featured image. When I went into the post image and started changing the size, I wondered why I didn’t have the ability to create a focus or essential part of the featured image. One of my frustrations with featured images in the past has been having images poorly cropped. Maybe a future feature would be that we can identify a focus when we upload a feature image, to better display those images cropped? Especially if we have scale > cover as an option.

To be clear, I'm talking about this option that's built into the Cover block:

Here's an example from my personal site with TT2 where the featured image is cut off for example:

The biggest question mark in my mind is how setting the focal point wouldn't necessarily solve the odd cropping issues as whatever the focal point was set to would apply to all featured images. Either way, wanted to pass along for more thoughts as it was an interesting take :)

[jasmussen]

It would indeed be nice to find a focal picker component that is more compressed in its resting state than what we have now, so that we can use it in more places. Without further changes, in the case of the featured image block you'd have to just decide the focal point without any context, but that could still be valuable.

Interestingly, many smartphones today store metadata in images as to where faces are present. It could be interesting if that metadata could automatically be read and applied 🤔

[mtias]

We'd need to store the coordinates in a custom field to support this.

[Marc-pi]

yes, that's a big (daily) need, as explained by @annezazu write a post, add your featured image, but in your post the image is croped on the wrong area because there is no focus selector... i don't know if we have to merge the image and the cover block, for sure in DB that's another story -;-) poke @richtabor

[dhanson-wp]

Agreed with @Marc-pi that this is a pretty regular need in the post editing experience. Clients continually ask how their images should be formatted before uploading them to fit within the designs of query loops and post templates. You should be able to forgo specific image cropping in favor of the focal point selector.