One focal point per asset
The focal point of an image marks where its subject is: the face, the product, the thing that should stay in frame. It matters when you ask GraphQL for a cropped version. Pass imgixParams like w: 200, h: 200, fit: crop, and if a focal point is set, DatoCMS automatically adds fp-x and fp-y so the crop is built around the subject rather than the dead center of the image. You set it by clicking on the image in the upload's preview.
When we first shipped this, we let you set a different focal point for each locale, behind an interface that did almost everything in its power to hide that fact. The control sat on the left, over the image. Which locale you were actually editing was decided somewhere else entirely: a language selector tucked into the Default metadata panel on the right, with nothing visibly connecting the two. The only hint was a small Focal point (English) label that changed quietly when you switched languages on the far side of the screen.
We were wrong, about both the idea and the interface. A focal point describes where the subject physically sits in the pixels, and a face doesn't move when you translate the page into German. And because the localizability was effectively invisible, almost nobody used it. Across more than 20 million multi-locale uploads, 92% had a focal point set in the primary locale only. That was less a deliberate choice than the natural result of an interface that never let on there was anything else to set. Of the few who did discover the per-locale behaviour, 95% simply repeated the same coordinates across all locales. Just 0.019% ever set genuinely different focal points across locales, and even then, the differences were almost always too small to see.
Worse, making it localizable didn't only add friction. It quietly broke cropping. Because nearly everyone set the point in a single language, focal-point cropping worked in that language and silently fell back to a plain centre crop everywhere else. The subject you carefully framed in English could end up off-centre, or cropped out entirely, in Italian, with nothing in the editor to warn you.
So we've fixed it.
What changes for everyone today
Every asset now has a single focal point: one value, shared across all locales. This isn't an opt-in. It applies to every project right away.
Cropping is now consistent across languages. Set the focal point once, and it applies in every locale. If you were only setting it in your primary locale (as most people were), your crops everywhere else just improved on their own, with nothing for you to do.
The editor is simpler, too. The focal point is no longer tied to the language selector or to the Default metadata form. It's now an always-visible control on the upload's preview. Click anywhere on the image to aim it, and the new position saves instantly in the background: no language to pick, no Save button to hunt for. (That also retires the old gotcha where the Save button hid inside a collapsible panel and was easy to lose after you'd moved the point.)
On the CDA, the response shape doesn't change. focalPoint is still a single value per query. It just now resolves to that one shared value in every locale, instead of vanishing in the locales where no one had set it.
In the rare case where you'd deliberately set different focal points per locale, the value from your primary locale is the one we keep. If you need the old per-locale values restored, contact Support.
If you read or write focal points through the Content Management API, there's a short follow-up for you: an optional, tidier CMA format. Read it here.