This is probably a serious newb question, but...

I'm having trouble getting zenphoto to cache my custom crops. In my theme options, I have my crops set to be 100 by 161. When I go to pick my crops in the admin, the crop box shows the correct sizes, allows me to move it around and pick what area I want to showcase, and save. It looks great in the preview. However, when I check the cache, I see that zenphoto insists on saving all thumbnail images at 100 by 62. It's got the correct crop area, the one I chose, but it's smashed it down to be a fraction of the original height. In the theme it will then stretch the image back up to 100 by 161, but obviously that looks very strange and pixelated.

I have searched and searched through the menus and am not seeing where to change the size at which it -saves- the thumbnails, not just displays them. Am I missing something here? I am becoming very confused.

Probably the theme you are using has its own idea of what the crops should be. But sinze you did not mention either the theme or the Zenphoto version you are using, this is just a guess.

I'm using the theme zenpage-default at the moment, although i got into the CSS and changed all the colors at some point. Since you mentioned this, though, I tried switching to a different theme, and still have this problem.

As for versions, I've got Zenphoto version 1.2.7 [4741] (Official Build) and PHP version: 5.2.9

zenpage default does make its own image size selections.

I just went through all the theme files and can see no obvious place where it does that. How can I change it, and why does it persist in cropping to the very same size (100 by 62) even when I switch to a theme like effervescence_plus which has its own very different display requirements?

Perhaps you should purge your cache. Best at this point to give us a link to your site. What you are describing is not something I have seen/heard about before except when the theme itself picks the image size.

The Zenpage-default theme uses custom crop sizes for the album thumbs only and this out of convenience because of the box layout with the description right to the thumb. `album.php` around line 40

The image thumbs itself uses the standard `printImageThumb` function and does not use specific sizes.

I have some suspicion I'm not explaining this very well, so i'll try again.

With themes that use the getCustomAlbumThumb function, zenphoto will indeed generate a thumbnail at the *size* it specifies. Which is great and dandy, only I can't figure out how to get this function to automatically use the crop height, width, and x y positions I've selected in my admin and which I can see are stored in the sql database. So for me this function tends to generate not crops at all but only resizes. If there is a way to get it to access these stored data, I would love to know, as that would seem to circumvent the trouble with the theme options entirely.

But the real mystery I was trying to report is that in themes where printAlbumThumbImage is used, it uses the correct crop area, and displays the thumbnail at the width and height I specified in theme options (100 x 161), but when i use "view image in a new window" it is always revealed that the actual size of the image is something... else. Since making the original post I have tried many combinations of height and width in the admin area, and have been totally baffled by the results. At first it looked like it would obey the width I asked for but always return a height of 62, but since then it's gotten much more confusing. I really cannot tell how it is picking the numbers it is picking. I have some vague suspicion it is trying to make the saved thumbnails roughly the same ratio as the original, but at this point, who knows.

This seems to leave me with a choice between an image that is a correct size but cropped on an irrelevant part of the image or is the entire image scaled down (even if the original dimensions don't match, which is also awkward looking) or with a display of the image that is a correct area, but saved at the wrong size so it has to be scaled by the browser and looks shoddy.

I tried clearing the cache but the newly generated images aren't any better.

Ok, you can retrieve any database field from an object by using the `object->get('field')` method. So you would have to call the getCustomAlbumThumb() with those parameters. To get the actual thumbnail image (from which you get the crop) use `album->getAlbumThumbImage()`