When preparing images for your e-commerce website, you are often faced with a problem when it comes to aspect ratio. Some of your images will be portrait, some landscape and others bizarre sizes. E-commerce software usually tries to overcome this hurdle by cropping your images as thumbnails to ensure everything lines up nice and neatly. This is great, but vital parts of your image can usually end up being missed. On top of that images given to you by suppliers can come in a variety of pixel sizes, most of which will be incredibly large and will need to be resized to something manageable for the internet.
I found this great tool called FastStone Photo Resizer which will bulk resize images to any size you want, but more importantly will centre the image and pad it with white background to make it square (or any other particular size you require). This enables all of your images to then be displayed fully on your website in a particular size with no automatic cropping necessary. It has many other neat features, but I would highly recommend you take a look if you manage an e-commerce site where all the images need to be the same size.
