Hi Andrew! as long as there's a good crop tool & the images go through imagemagick afterwards - that's good enough for me :) To look consistently good, personally, I think images need to be hand cropped - & being able to enforce that is important.

On one domain - I've got a trimmed down & image customised Dolphin install (which looks very nice I think) + in another directory, I've got a customised WP install. I've been looking at the two in comparison with each other for a while see more (in regards of the kind of points I've listed above) - thinking about how I can somehow integrate the two (at first I was thinking to integrate WP directly into Dolphin, but decided I wouldn't be able to get them to match well enough). However, the best solution, because of it's more comprehensive functionality would be if Dolphin could have more of the slickness of the WP (& it's speed - as Dolphin isn't that snappy in response sometimes). From a dev point of view I think it's worth seeing the comparison (given their both sites put together by myself - towards a similar aim) - but with Dolphin aiming at providing additional functionality. However they are both adult sites (soft to medium). Am I allowed to post such links here as goog.le links with a warning - or alternatively I could forward the links direct to yourself.