Change the ImageCache Background Color in Cropped Images

If you've used the Drupal Imagecache module, you know it's a great tool. However one thing that has always annoyed me is the inability to change the background color of cropped images.

The module defaults to fill whitespace with a black background, however I personally prefer to use the same bg color as the page, for a more elegant design. I finally found an excellent patch that works great!  For those of you looking for the same solution, give this a try, it works like a charm.  The trick is that it's not modifying the ImageCache module, but instead modifying the ImageAPI module since that is the one doing the cropping & resizing.

In the patch, be sure to change the hex value to your desired background color. Also, you'll have to regenerate the imagecache images in order for this to take effect on previous images. Other than that it works really nicely.

Here's a link to the original post, and the patch is also printed below if you just want to get in and give it a try. 

Index: imageapi_gd.module
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/drupal-contrib/contributions/modules/imageapi/imageapi_gd.module,v
retrieving revision 1.13.2.7
diff -u -r1.13.2.7 imageapi_gd.module
--- imageapi_gd.module 17 Apr 2009 00:15:21 -0000 1.13.2.7
+++ imageapi_gd.module 8 Oct 2009 21:05:23 -0000
@@ -27,6 +27,15 @@
     '#default_value' => variable_get('imageapi_jpeg_quality', 75),
     '#field_suffix' => '%',
   );
+ $form['imageapi_crop_background'] = array(
+ '#type' => 'textfield',
+ '#title' => t('Crop background'),
+ '#description' => t('Hex string specifying the background color to use when cropping images. If not provided, will use the default. Examples: "ABC", "ABCD", "AABBCC", "AABBCCDD".'),
+ '#size' => 10,
+ '#maxlength' => 8,
+ '#default_value' => variable_get('imageapi_crop_background', ''),
+ '#field_prefix' => '#',
+ );
   return system_settings_form($form);
 }

@@ -93,9 +102,22 @@
  * TRUE or FALSE, based on success.
  */
 function imageapi_gd_image_crop(&$image, $x, $y, $width, $height) {
+ // Create an image with the new width and height.
   $res = imageapi_gd_create_tmp($image, $width, $height);

- if (!imagecopyresampled($res, $image->resource, 0, 0, $x, $y, $width, $height, $width, $height)) {
+ // Fill the background color if desired.
+ $background = variable_get('imageapi_crop_background', '');
+ if (!empty($background)) {
+ $background = imageapi_hex2rgba($background);
+ $background = imagecolorallocatealpha($res, $background[0], $background[1], $background[2], $background[3]);
+ imagefill($res, 0, 0, $background);
+ }
+
+ // Copy the source image to our new destination image. We use
+ // $image->info['width] instead of $width because we are copying
+ // using the source image's width and height, not the destination
+ // width and height.
+ if (!imagecopyresampled($res, $image->resource, -$x, -$y, 0, 0, $image->info['width'], $image->info['height'], $image->info['width'], $image->info['height'])) {
     return FALSE;
   }