Enable image cropping in widgets

[ggeisler]

When we get IIIF cropping finished for mastheads and thumbnails, it would be interesting to evaluate what it would take to enable users to crop images used in widgets. The value of this is most clear with the image grid widget, which looks much less impressive when the images have visible borders or color bars:

A Stanford curator specifically mentioned frustration with the image grid widget, but other widgets that feature images could also benefit from cropping images that have black borders, color bars, etc.:

Spotlight Work Cycle 2024

Widget Priority Order

Highest priority (in no particular order)

• Item Embed
• Item Row
• Uploaded Item Row

Lowest priority (in priority order)

1. Browse Categories, Feature Pages
2. Item Grid
3. Item Carousel, Item Slideshow

[laurensorensen]

See updated comment below please.

This comment explains the issues we were having with Virtual Tribunals (VT) and image cropping.

VT has a lot of browse categories, and we also have very few images, as our collections are text-heavy/centric. When we have the opportunity to use images from a collection or find public domain images, we often have to crop them to display a certain area, e.g. head and shoulders of a person convicted in a the associated case. (In this use case, Lauren is talking about using images as Browse category tiles.)

The issue we had with cropping was that when we went to crop, the pixel height and width didn't match the head and shoulders requirement (showed instead an awkward view of head-only, or cutting off forehead) and so we had to go to Photoshop/Gimp to carefully crop the image, or use Photoshop/Gimp to arrange a background which let us then fit the image into the required view of head and shoulders. If the cropping tool could have more features, including allowing for a background color (e.g. letterboxing), that would go a long way to help us with this issue.

Let me know if any more detail is needed for this user story.

[laurensorensen]

Rewritten for clarity / step by step explication:

This comment explains the issues we were having with Virtual Tribunals (VT) and image cropping in the context of browse category tiles.

VT has a lot of browse categories, and relatively few images, as our collections are text-heavy/centric. When we have the opportunity to use images from a collection or find public domain images, we often have to crop them to display a certain area. In this use case, I am discussing working with images as Browse category tiles.

Steps we took:

1. Chose an image with a specific detail we wanted to feature (head and shoulders of a defendant)
2. Went to the browse category section in exhibit dashboard, added the image and wasn’t able to fit the head and shoulders part of the photo within the parameters of the cropping tool without cutting off the person’s forehead.
3. Because of the parameters not fitting, we then used Gimp (open source Photoshop) to edit, located the aspect ratio required to appear correctly in a browse category tile, and cropped the image in the Gimp application instead, using letterbox "bars" above and below.
4. The image was then saved as a JPEG and re-uploaded as a Browse category tile successfully.

Expected behavior / would like to see:

1. We would like to be able to have a background image letterboxed-style as a part of the cropping feature, which would make the task of uploading images to the Spotlight browse category section more fluid and allow us to skip the Gimp / photo editing steps outside of the Spotlight application.

Let me know if any more detail is needed for this user story.

[corylown]

@laurensorensen I'm going to move your comment to a new issue. It seems distinct from adding cropping features to widgets and is more about changing the behavior of the current cropping feature available for browse categories.