The aspect ratio of the image you uploaded...

I don't see a problem here. If you're making images yourself (character portraits for example) - what difference does it make, to which aspect ratio crop it? You may as well crop it as recommended by policy guidelines. If you're getting images from the web - just get another image. For me, it didn't make things harder (or any different) at all. And I'm making hundreds of images every month.

Additional checkbox won't work for obvious reasons - the people will just mark it no matter how it looks. For each image category, a particular aspect ratio is expected. 
As API documentation states: For shows, people and characters this is an image in poster format; for episodes the image is in landscape format.
That's what people would be expecting, and that's what we need to provide.

@tnt wrote:
As API documentation states: For shows, people and characters this is an image in poster format; for episodes the image is in landscape format.
That's what people would be expecting, and that's what we need to provide.

That's a important point. The images aren't just being used here on TVMaze, so even if they look ok here they might not elsewhere.

I'm 100% with tnt on this.

Too many times, I've seen people images that were uploaded to this site where half the head is cut off due to the image being the wrong aspect ratio.

It literally takes seconds to paste an image into MS Paint & crop to the correct portrait aspect.

@TonyMayhew wrote:
I'm 100% with tnt on this.

Too many times, I've seen people images that were uploaded to this site where half the head is cut off due to the image being the wrong aspect ratio.

It literally takes seconds to paste an image into MS Paint & crop to the correct portrait aspect.

There's also a lot of online image editors, so you even don't have to download the image. And you could do even on mobile.

@tnt wrote:
If you're getting images from the web - just get another image. 

If these do not exist and I can clearly see that the cropping would have worked, any additional effort to edit an image is simply prohibitive for me.

Additional checkbox won't work for obvious reasons - the people will just mark it no matter how it looks. 

And can then be held accountable, if they checked it.

For shows, people and characters this is an image in poster format; for episodes the image is in landscape format.
That's what people would be expecting, and that's what we need to provide.

And this is what they are getting, if the cropped image is used that is also shown on the page.
Dishing out random, somewhat poster-like resolutions in the original file isn't really more useful than the old approach.
 

@markus wrote:
If these do not exist and I can clearly see that the cropping would have worked, any additional effort to edit an image is simply prohibitive for me.

Not everyone sees it that way. Most people don't mind the effort, especially considering something this insignificant. The users who were uploading properly sized images all along probably don't even know about these new restrictions.

And can then be held accountable, if they checked it.

This means adding to our workload a necessity to check and deal with those users. Much easier to just prevent it from happening, even if that means getting fewer images. By the end of the day, the quality is as important as the quantity. 

And this is what they are getting, if the cropped image is used that is also shown on the page.

It's a small preview image. They could ask for an unscaled original, which is supposed to fit the same standards.

Dishing out random, somewhat poster-like resolutions in the original file isn't really more useful than the old approach. 

In any case, it's better than allowing literally anything. As Tony said, we've had a fair share of actor photos with half of the face, or character images with an arm and a shoulder.

By the way, the policy always demanded people's images (both actor and character) to be in the portrait format. If users didn't ignore this demand, we probably won't be needing any additional restrictions.

Many editors let you set a fixed ratio to crop at (like 4:5, or 8:10 or whatever), that'll give you a perfect AR every time when you crop something.

This is a very nice online cropping tool: https://croppola.com/