{"id":32332,"date":"2024-01-12T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-12T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/?p=32332"},"modified":"2025-10-30T15:16:36","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T22:16:36","slug":"smart-cropping-just-got-smarter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/smart-cropping-just-got-smarter","title":{"rendered":"Smart Crop | AI-Powered Image Cropping for Free With Cloudinary"},"content":{"rendered":"

For several years now, Cloudinary has been excelling in the field of smart cropping \u2014 making sure important parts of images and videos are kept when resizing and cropping them automatically, and at scale.<\/p>\n

Cloudinary Smart Crop uses AI to analyze each image, decide what the most prominent and relevant parts of the image are, and make sure that the cropped image preserves its essential elements for the given dimensions.<\/p>\n

You can use Cloudinary Smart Crop and get full access to all of Cloudinary for free and for life<\/a>. Sign up now to start using it!<\/p>\n

Auto Gravity Recap<\/h2>\n

There are many ways you can crop images<\/a> using Cloudinary to suit your page design. \u201cGravity\u201d is something you can specify when cropping images in order to determine what to focus on. If you don\u2019t specify a gravity, the center of the image will always be the focus. When cropping images automatically and at scale, you won\u2019t know what\u2019s in the image, so keeping the center of the image won\u2019t always work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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Original image<\/b><\/p>\n<\/span>\n\n

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Cropping without gravity<\/b><\/p>\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s why specifying a gravity is helpful. If you\u2019re only interested in the faces in your images, you can specify faces<\/code> as the gravity (g_faces<\/code> in URLs) and Cloudinary\u2019s algorithms will try to keep them. Or, if you\u2019re interested in a particular object, you can use the Cloudinary AI Content Analysis add-on<\/a> to specify the object as the gravity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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Focus on the bag<\/b><\/p>\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n

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If you don\u2019t have a preference for what to keep, you can simply use the auto gravity transformation parameter (g_auto<\/code> in URLs), and rely on AI to focus on the best area of interest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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Introducing Auto Crop<\/h2>\n

So, if auto gravity focuses on the most interesting part of the image automatically, then where does auto crop fit in?<\/p>\n

The answer lies in the type of crop that we use with auto gravity. Auto gravity points to the main area of interest, but the type of crop determines how much of that area to keep.<\/p>\n

The crop, fill, and thumbnail cropping modes each have their limitations:<\/p>\n