Let's say you are resizing images to a standard size that can be expressed as a ratio (width/height, king shine). The problem I came into was that I wanted to be reasonable with the proportion of the images that my customer is uploading (couldn't we all use a little less horizontal on pictures?), but I wanted to reject the horizontal pictures when they were uploading vertical ones. So I wanted to accept proportions of images that were within a reasonable threshold (+ or -) of what I will be resizing them to.