Image Cropping/Resizing Solution

Question

I am looking into building an image uploading interface within Visualforce. I really want it to work similar to how the interface works when you upload your Chatter profile picture. The user should be able to upload an image, then crop the image to a thumbnail that has a locked aspect ratio. The file should then be resized to 120x120. Once the image is cropped, I need to send this to the server and save as an attachment. I only need to save the cropped version.

I know that there is no server-side Apex support for image manipulation. I'm looking at JS and image resize/cropping services to see if there is a decent solution.

Has anyone done something like this? Any recommended libraries and/or services to use?

P.S. If you want to see Apex support for image manipulation you should vote up this idea.

Answer 1

jcrop appears to do (link to google because github is down at the time of writing) what you're looking for, I doubt image manipulation would every be directly supported in Apex as it's not a feature likely to get a whole lot of use, but maybe it will happen!

I would definitely do this in javascript anyway as it would minimise the amount of back-and-forth with relatively large chunks of data if using the controller for updates which would be very slow relative to processing locally on the user's machine. Also I forget how big the heap is these days but it'd be easy to blow out with large image sizes since all manipulations would happen on decompressed image data, and bitmap data gets big fast.