With this plugin for Kirby 2 you can prevent the most important part of an image from being cropped when creating automated thumbs.

The plugin does two things:

1. It provides a custom field that allows you to set a focus point. The focus point is saved to the meta data file.
2. It provides a new method focusCrop(), which uses the focus point saved in the meta data file to crop an image in such a way that the focus point is in the center of the cropped image – or (if that's not possible) at least isn't cropped.

• Kirby CMS, Version 2.3+
• GD Library or ImageMagick

Be aware that the plugin overrides the default thumbs driver for GD or ImageMagick as described here.

If you are using the Kirby CLI you can install this plugin by running the following command in your shell from the root folder of your Kirby installation:

kirby plugin:install flokosiol/kirby-focus

Of course you can also download and unpack the zip file (or simply clone the repository). If necessary, rename the folder to focus and put it into site/plugins of your Kirby installation.

Please make sure, that the plugin folder structure looks like this:

site/plugins/focus/

If you want to add this plugin as a Git submodule.

$ cd your/project/root
$ git submodule add https://github.com/flokosiol/kirby-focus.git site/plugins/focus

Add the focus field to the file fields of your blueprint and make sure to name it focus like this:

files:
  fields:
    focus:
      label: My focus field
      type: focus

I recommend to keep the default field key, but if you like you are able to change it by adding the following line to your config.php:

c::set('focus.field.key', 'betterfocuskey');

If the default filename settings (considering dimensions, focus, quality, grayscale and blur) won't work for you, feel free to change it to the more flexible but less beatiful hash variant by adding the following line to your config.php:

c::set('focus.filename.hash', true);

Use the focusCrop() method in your template to get a complete <img> tag:

<?php

  // you need a Kirby image object like this
  $image = $page->images()->first();

  // crop a square of 200px x 200px
  echo $image->focusCrop(200);

  // crop a rectangle of 300px x 200px
  echo $image->focusCrop(300,200);

  // crop a rectangle of 200px x 400px with a quality of 80%
  echo $image->focusCrop(200,400,array('quality' => 80));

  // crop a grayscale square of 300px x 300px
  echo $image->focusCrop(300,300,array('blur' => true));

  // crop a rectangle of 200px x 300px and force coordinates (overrides user input)
  echo $image->focusCrop(200,300,array('focusX' => 0.3, 'focusY' => 0.6));

?>

As with every Kirby image object you can use all the known methods like this:

<?php

  $url = $image->focusCrop(200,300)->url();
  $filename = $image->focusCrop(150)->filename();

?>

As of Version 1.0.2 you can also use the new helper methods to get the x and y values like this:

<?php

  $x = $image->focusX();
  $y = $image->focusY();

?>

Special thanks to Tamara Chahine. The js part of the focus field almost exactly her focalpoint script with some minor adjustments.

Also special thanks to the Kirby community for the support, especially Thomas, Philippe and Sonja.

Thanks to Zac Sturgeon and Unsplash for the great photo.