I was preparing the annual family photo calendar when I bumped into a wall of stupidity that astonished me: The major photo and gift printing sites (Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak/Ofoto) have dumbed down their sites to such a low standard that you can't do simple things like put a square-cropped image on a photo calendar page without having their system mangle your image.
To the photo/gift printing sites: Not every photograph is 4:3 or 3:2 aspect ratio rectangle.
I gathered together my 13 images (12 months + cover), adjusted and cropped them in Bibble Pro (an awesome photo workflow and RAW conversion software that runs on Linux, Mac and Windows,) went to upload them to Shutterfly (who I used last year to make the calendar and with whom I successfully used square-cropped images last year) and quickly found that a couple of my square-cropped images (aspect ratio 1:1) were having the top and bottoms automatically chopped off by their system in an effort to force my square image into the rectangle it wanted. I had some wide shots cropped at 16:10 aspect ratio and it did the same thing, chopping off significant portions of the left and right part of my image. Frustrated, I went to Snapfish (despite previous problems with getting photos delivered in a timely fashion during the holiday season.) and found a slightly different interface with the same behavior mangling my photographs. OK, they can't all be the same,right? I went to Ofoto (now Kodak) and had the exact same problem. At this point I had a couple hours into what I thought was going to be a half hour project and was thoroughly frustrated.
I searched Google and came up with a photo and gift printing site I hadn't heard of before. Quite frustrated at this point, I visited Vista Print and was pleasantly surprised. They have standard cropping behavior, but they also provide a simple "Scale to Fit" option that lets you keep the aspect ratio and expand the image to either fit the height or width without cropping your picture. How hard is that? A simple option in the user interface that let's more advanced users creatively build their calendars the ways they want to.
Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak/Ofoto, please add some sensible options to your cropping step. Something simple like a hidden "advanced options" dialog, a "no cropping" option, or a "scale to fit" option. This would meet all your users needs without confusing the brain-feeble amongst us.
Next year I probably won't bother with the "big guys". Vista Print meets my needs and the calendars I received from them (very timely delivery) looked great. All the above mentioned sites work fine with Firefox on Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon) for the record. Some of the drag-to-web upload functionality (Shutterfly) appears to be Windows-only, but everything else functions fine.
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