Using ImageCache to scale and crop images on the fly

Now that we have ImageField support for the company node type, we can look to style the input images to make them more presentable. When it comes to image handling, we inevitably find ourselves performing a series of repeated steps, such as cropping, scaling, resizing, and so on, as per the requirements of our theme (or themes, as the case may be). It used to be the case that this procedure had to be performed manually for each image or, if we were a little more proactive, performed through a script to apply our changes on-the-fly. All this is, however, a thing of the past thanks to the ImageCache module.

The ImageCache module brings the concept of presets to Drupal's image systems. A preset is a term used to represent the series of operations that we are looking to perform on the image. Furthermore, it is not restricted to simple size and scale changes as its APIs can be extended to play with the color and styling of the images as well...