BuddyPress Crop Avatar to Any Ratio

Looking to get rid of the annoying aspect ratio on your BuddyPress avatar crop tool?

This was very poorly documented and nowhere to be found on Google so I decided to figure this out and share the solution with the community. This is probably not the best solution as I had to modify a core file for BuddyPress, but it turns out this plugin was created in a fashion that forces you to modify the core files anyhow… here’s what I did:

Open up /wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-cssjs.php

Somewhere around line 92 you should find the call to Jcrop (the jQuery plugin used to crop the avatar in BuddyPress). All we have to do here is comment out the aspectRatio property like so:

jQuery('#avatar-to-crop').Jcrop({
  onChange: showPreview,
  onSelect: showPreview,
  onSelect: updateCoords,
  /* aspectRatio: <?php echo $aspect_ratio ?>, */
  setSelect: [ 0, 0, <?php echo $full_width?>, <?php echo $full_height?> ]
});

That should do it!