Look: out of the box, you can only specify a fixed width or height in coppermine. If you specify 80 pixels as max dimension, an image with original resolution 800 x 600 will be resized to 80 x 60 as a thumbnail. But what happens if the original image you upload is 800 x 700? The resulting thumbnail would be 80 x 70, so it would have to be cropped by 5 pixels at the left and 5 pixels on the right. Coppermine doesn't come with thumbnail cropping out of the box. That's where Stramm's modpack comes into play: you have to look at the documentation for Stramm's modpack, download the package and apply (install) it as suggested in the docs (the modpack docs, that is). Then (and only then) coppermine will have the additional capability to crop thumbnails. However, this can be a tricky thing: if you have thumb cropping enabled, what happens if you upload an image with 800 x 2000 pixels that display a person? It will be resized to 80 x 200 thumbnail and then the thumbnail will be cropped, cutting 70 pixels from the top and 70 pixels from the bottom. The result may be a thumbnail where the face of the person has been "cut off" and only the chest being visible, which is not very attractive. Bottom line: thumb cropping will only work really well if you choose for one orientation (portrait vs. landscape) for all pics you upload. It will only work if you do as I suggested and apply Stramm's modpack.
If you're not ready to install the modpack and want to go with the "regular" coppermine install, you'll have to set 80 as maximum for thumbs and then make sure that you only upload images with portrait orientation and a fixed width:height ratio of 4:3. That's it. I can give you no other piece of advice.
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Topic: change size of thumbs for gallery! NEED HELP! (Read 4085 times)