Best approach to image uploading and display?

I come across this with many clients...

They want to maintain control over uploading images (products, real estate, portfolio etc) to their websites but they have images in portrait and landscape view. On their websites, however, they want to maintain a uniformed layout so, for example, they might have thumbnails of these images displayed in landscape view on an introductory page of results, leading through to the actual image on a detail page.

Problem is, if they upload a portrait image it shunts the layout all over the place and everything looks disorganised.

Does/can the resize option in the upload behavior, or Image Resizer extension, cope with this scenario?

I understand that there is a "crop from centre" option in Image Resizer but most of our image file names are called from database, in repeat regions, or are tied into a NivoSlider, or something similar, and that usually causes problems (http://www.webassist.com/forums/posts.php?id=35640).

I'm looking for a "once and for all" solution to this because it keeps cropping (ho ho!) up.

I'd appreciate your advice. Thank you.
NJ