Over at the SIGGRAPH 2007, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shami something you really have to see, context aware image resizing.

(note: if you read this via an RSS feed, see the video on youtube.)

Image resizing with an x and y axis that keep the same ratio is easy and can be done by any imagemagic-a-like tool that can be used in for example Drupal. Resizing can also be done with some CSS. See for example debatte.welt.de and make your browser smaller.

But what if you want to dynamically resize a picture without keeping the aspect ratio? The only option is to crop right? Wrong. With the report they presented and the video linked above, you can find where you can add or delete pixel lines in the picture. And you can even use weights to prevent parts of the image to be erased or to be let it erased first when making changes to an axis.

It would be great if this kind of image handling would end up at one of the supported image tools under Drupal. And it would be great as well if Drupal 7 (after the upcoming Drupal 6 version) would focus on media handeling in drupal something that is really needed.

D7, the media release?