Having played around with the image tag and the crop feature to fit the selected images into our banner rotation, when it does its automatic cropping, there doesn't seem to be able to specify a way to determine where the cropping center is.

However looking at the thumbnail editable type, there is an option there.

Is there any downside to using a thumbnail type tied to a separate image, and using it set to the large image size I need?

I saw over at: viewtopic.php?p=16313#p16313 / viewtopic.php?p=15915#p15915 that it's potentially coming with a new version of couch at some point in the future. Is it worth just waiting until this feature is available in the next version of couch, rather than doing an odd workaround to get the crop functionality which will probably break when I then change to do it properly?

Cheers.

[cheesypoof]

It is just fine to have an image editable region that performs no resizing/cropping and to leave that task to a thumbnail editable region or thumbnail tag. It is also perhaps more prudent to code this way because you retain the source image, which makes employing future layout/design changes less problematic.

If you can wait, I would suggest doing so...

I don't know if the following would be relevant to your case but do give http://designshack.net/articles/css/focal-point-intelligent-cropping-of-responsive-images/ a look.