Automatic face detection in WordPress?
You’ve uploaded that photograph to your WordPress website. And being a savvy photographer, you probably didn’t put your subject right in the middle of the frame. Maybe you used the rule of thirds, or the golden ratio, or otherwise created a nice composition where the subject is to the side (or above or below) the middle.
And then you upload that photo to WordPress.
And then WordPress crops it for a thumbnail image, and crops right to the middle, awkwardly cutting your subject in two.
Oops.
My Eyes Are Up Here
Thankfully, there’s a WordPress plugin that can help. My Eyes Are Up Here allows you to set a center point for thumbnail cropping. It includes the ability to (attempt) facial recognition which is an obvious use case, but you can also set the focus point manually. Let’s explain with some screenshots. We’re going to use this image for demonstration with a portrait:
I’ve uploaded it to WordPress. You’ll see a new section below the standard title/alt/caption fields… but as you can see, the default thumbnail is going chop Kiersi mid-face.
WordPress Face Detection
Let’s find her face, since that makes sense as a thumbnail image. Click the Face Detection button, and it does a good job of finding her face, as shown by the blue overlay:
You’ll also note that the thumbnails now show her face. So when we insert the thumbnail image into a post, here’s what we have:
Much nicer than just cropping to the center, don’t you think?
Set WordPress Thumbnail Crop Point
What if we aren’t talking about a portrait? What if we have some railroad photography instead? What if we’d like the thumbnail to feature the front of the locomotive? First, we upload, but this time instead of clicking the Face Detection button, we’ll click on Add Hotspots and then click on the nose of the locomotive (indicated by the red overlay):
Then we insert the thumbnail into our post… and boom:
Much nicer than the default!
Download My Eyes Are Up Here from the WordPress.org plugin repository, or search for it from your WordPress Add New plugins screen.
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