Cropping thumbnails to specific dimensions on front end post

Question

Probably not the best title description but here we go. One of my custom post types is for youtube videos which I take the thumb from youtube and upload it as a thumbnail for the post. Now it's easy enough to download the image from youtube and use media_handle_sideload() to upload it as an attachment for the post and set thumbnail sizes for it be cropped to but youtube video images come with excess black bars at the top and bottom. So I need a way to crop them out.

So I have a custom thumbnail size that crops all thumbs to a width of 224px called 'post-thumbnail'.

I get and process the thumb like so from a front end post.

$vid_url = $_POST['video_url'];
$video_id = getVideoId($vid_url);
if ($video_id) {
   $video_response = wp_remote_retrieve_response_code(wp_remote_request($vid_url));
   if ($video_response == 200) {
      $video_url = $vid_url;
      $video_image_url = 'http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$video_id.'/hqdefault.jpg';
      $tmp = download_url($video_image_url);
      $file_array = array(
                    'name' => basename( $video_image_url ),
                    'tmp_name' => $tmp
                  );
   }
}
$pid = wp_insert_post($new_post);
$vid_thumb = media_handle_sideload( $file_array, $pid );
update_post_meta($pid,'video_thumb',$vid_thumb);

Now this gives me a thumb of 224px/168px so now what I need to do is crop the thumb to 224px/120px knocking off 24px from the top and bottom. Any ideas?

Answer 1

media_handle_sideload handles the uploads in the same way the normal upload does. That means, when you upload a remote image (YouTube thumbnails in your case) it will automatically create the thumbnails of sizes registered using add_image_size.

So, what you need to do is create a thumbnail of desired size and call it in your loop.

function my_setup() {
    //Support Thumbnails
    add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );

    //Add Thumbnail Sizes
    add_image_size( 'youtube', 224, 120, true );
}
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'my_setup' );

And then in your loop;

if ( '' != get_the_post_thumbnail() ) {
    the_post_thumbnail( 'youtube' );
}