On 4 June at 5:32pm CEST, we deployed a backward-compatibility-breaking change, even though we pledge to never 'just do' this and, for example, take extreme care in stack herding to ensure our customers' setups only change when they choose to opt in.

I was responsible for that decision and the reason for it was that I noticed that our crop resize strategy was not working as advertised. Instead, it mimicked the behavior of its fillcrop counterpart.

After some deliberation, I decided to go ahead with the change thinking the crop resize strategy was currently not used by anyone at all due to the limited set of use cases for its purpose: "Who would want to crop images of unknown dimensions without supplying specific coordinates or detecting faces?"

My reasoning was also supported by the fact that no one had ever noticed it was not implemented correctly for the past nine years.

What I failed to take into consideration is the obvious case where someone might intend to use fillcrop, but accidentally configured crop, hence relying on faulty behavior by our platform. It is clear that I should have thought this through better so that I could have implemented it differently and made more of an effort to notify our customers about the upcoming fix.

All this jeopardizes what we strive to be: a robust building block for business that can be blindly relied upon.

I should have been more careful in this regard and I apologize for my poor judgement. We will be sure to learn from this mistake and make certain that it doesn't happen again.

If you were accustomed to using crop and are now noticing weird images, please switch to the fillcrop strategy. Any affected images can be re-resized if you also exported the :original files.

If you need assistance in repairing bad images, please reach out to support.

While we will be able to repair most images, we do realize that we cannot make up for the potential headaches caused. Nonetheless, we are hoping to soften the pain a little, so please reach out if this happened to you and we will figure out suitable compensation.

Update June 8th we are reverting this change for the time being. New customers are still discovering breakage due to this change. If you have already switched to fillcrop you don't have to do anything because that's the proper name for what you were trying to achieve. We'll just be aliasing crop to fillcrop again since it has few sane use cases on its own, and this is how the system has been working for 9 years. We'll likely slowly deprecate crop altogether (you'd still be able to crop images if you supplied the crop param, which is more advanced than the crop resize strategy).