I am building a dating website; one of the issues that came up with
the programmers is Picture formatting; he has an automatic resize and
post method to adding your picture online on the site. I heard that
other sites (MATCH, JDATE, LAVALIFE..) do it all manually: sizing and
cropping the pictures and making them look better.

Any idea what the "norm" is out there? show me examples of all your
discussion points.

If the norm is cropping manually, what programs do admins use ? how
cumbersome is it to do it manually? time consuming?? is the method
better than automatically adjusting the picture and the thumbnails ?

My site is being built using in Microsoft .NET.

I need someone who understands this programming space/area very well
to answer this question please and shed some light on this entire
process.

Thanks