if you hit edit image you can use picnik to square up the source images and the thumbnails should follow suit.

the only other way I could imagine doing it is let you upload/customize a thumbnail for the image - keeping your big images rectangles and your small thumbs square.... if we tried to crop automatically we'd end up chopping people's faces off and whatnot, no?

"if we tried to crop automatically we'd end up chopping people's faces off and whatnot, no?"

Exactly what I'm looking for. I used to work with Drupal and ImageCache and I cropped the image from the center. It doesn't really matter if you chop a person's face off, it's only a thumbnail.

I can't make the source images square though, the idea is to present the whole image not simply a part of it. That's the role of a thumbnail.

I think I'll try modifying the code so that it'll show the thumbnail in a div with a set width and height. I'll make the thumbnail slightly bigger than needed, and have the overflow set at hidden.

made it clear you meant crop not scale:
http://www.concrete5.org/index.php?cID=10447...

Alright thanks!

I think it'd be nice to have the option to choose whether or not the thumbs should be cropped. This comes in handy depending on the design. I do understand your point about heads though. ;)

In the meantime I'll try hacking it and see if it works.

In case anyone comes across this discussion and is looking for this functionality, there is a new image gallery in the marketplace that will do automatic cropping of thumbnails:
http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/deluxe-image-gallery/...