[Plugin: Events Manager] Non-cropped resized images with and without Timthumb

I’d like to be able to use these two ways to show thumbnails in Settings > Formats/Layouts:

1. On single event page, show medium-sized thumbnails that are resized to dimensions without cropping, in other words, preserving the aspect ratio. Eg. original image 1000×500, space where to resize 400×400, resized image will be 400×200.
2. On a list, show multiple small thumbnails that are cropped from the original image without any regard to the aspect ratio. Eg. 1000×500 would become 100×100 if that’s the specified width.
3. Bonus: Have one or both of these reference straight out files without calling the Timthumb script. Despite Timthumb’s cache, using it still initializes the PHP engine and costs more processing power than calling for image files straight.

The plugin could be updated in these three ways to allow for the above benefits:

1. Add an extra argument: #_EVENTIMAGE{number,number,nocrop} to call Timthumb with cropping disabled. If Timthumb supports it, “noxcrop” and “noycrop” could be added to let siteadmin decide to only let the height or width instead of both (on different images on the same spot on different pages).
2. Add an extra argument: #_EVENTIMAGE{thumbnail/medium/large} to call the_post_thumbnail or get_the_post_thumbnail with the appropriate argument, so that the appropriate file will be served directly. If the site admin chooses to use eg. 100×100 thumbnails in the WordPress Media settings, WP automatically creates such files that can be called this way without Timthumb’s involvement.
3. Adding the same argument {thumbnail/medium/large} to #_EVENTIMAGEURL to return the address of the said file and let the siteadmin decide the HTML and CSS around it. For example <img src="#_EVENTIMAGEURL{medium}" title="Click to expand" /> allows for having jQuery to first show the image at 200×200, and then expand it to 300×300 and show the event info next to it when clicked, while all the time using the same 300×300 WordPress-generated “medium” image.

All the above should be applied equally to #_LOCATION* placeholders as well.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-manager/