I think a case can be made for having both options in the CMS, show original aspect ratio and the cropped version, with the ability to toggle between them.

Seeing as an image can often live as multiple different sizes/transforms when finally rendered on the site, the cropped version is nice because you can see where Craft will center it up for the transform. That's more useful in some cases, less so in others.

If you have a portrait shot of people, for example, it's a quick indication that you also need to update the focus point or you might marie antoinette someone. ;)

Similar to #5518...

@RitterKnightCreative I agree that it's a good feature request to be able to see how the cropped version of an image would look. But if this change was meant to solve that, I think it's a pretty bad solution. It only partly solves the problem, seeing an image cropped to a square is only barely useful if the final image is suppose to be cropped for 16:9. And removing the option for authors to see the original aspect ratio of the image, as intended by the photographer/art director, is a massive downside.

What would be a better solution would be to tie the cropping to the Asset field through settings. If it was possible to define a custom crop ratio (along with "no crop", ie "fit") in an Asset field's settings, and that crop showed up in the thumbnails on the field when you'd selected it, that'd be pretty amazing. And, if "fit" was used in the asset selection modals and the assets element index, everyone would be happy.

I find this to be a backwards step in Craft's image asset workflow. I work with a lot of mixed ratio images and I need to be able to see at a glance the ratio of an image before selecting it (portrait book covers, and screenshots at 4:3 ratio and 16:9 ratio for example).

I can see that cropped square images make for attractive grids, but in practice they aren't that useful for content-editors.

So it would be great if Craft could provide a way to configure this, otherwise it's going to be pretty painful for us to use this going forward.

I created a small plugin which fixes this while we wait for 3.5:
https://github.com/aelvan/more-fit-images

We do a lot of work on numerous client sites that have 1000's of images that are imported into Craft every day and use all sorts of aspect ratios (social media images, broadcast images). Upgrading any of those sites to Craft 3.4 would be a disaster because of these uniformly square cropped images alone. The editors would be helpless choosing from 20+ similar thumbnails, looking for a certain 16:9, for example.

This is now addressed for Craft 3.5.

The table view will continue using circular crops, though, as I think with such a small image, being able to make out some detail of the image is more important than knowing the aspect ratio.

I changed my mind on how we should be handling small thumbnails. Showing them at the correct aspect ratio isn’t really the end of the world. So I was able to implement the change for 3.4 with significantly less work than what I had done on the 3.5 branch. Will be in the next 3.4 release.

To get the fix early, change your craftcms/cms requirement in composer.json to:

"require": {
  "craftcms/cms": "dev-develop#8f6e9e8945d4df9627f0237dd47b0e66e4d52541 as 3.4.20",
  "...": "..."
}

Or if you’re already running Craft 3.5 Beta, then change your craftcms/cms requirement to "3.5.x-dev".

Then run composer update.

Craft 3.4.21 is out now with this change.