If you're using a version of Photoshop with face manipulation in the Liquify plugin, this isn't too difficult to do with actions.  After seeing this post I figured I'd see if I could figure out a non-script plugin for out of the box Photoshop.  It wasn't too hard.  Basically the action does this: 1. Duplicate the image. 2. Run liquify on the image to edit the scale of elements of the face. 3. Use difference blending to identify changes to the face elements and isolate. 4. Scale that isolation up to give you a desired outside edge of your crop. 5. Use cropping methods to size properly and crop to a square. 6. Delete all but the background.   The scaling of the isolated face elements defines how tight you crop on the faces, so changing Transform Current Layer with aspect ratio locked will allow for that to be changed.    This action is set to scale to 200x200 pixels using landscape or portrait detection.  Changing both of those Image Size settings will allow for different thumbs.   Add your prefered saving method and run it with a batch.  It seems to work great for me.     CropOnFace.zip    As a note, it is a little limited.  I've only run it on images with single individuals.  It will only work on the first face Liquify selects.  You can probably use Liquify's multiple face selection to set up different versions of the action for 2, 3, 4, etc..., but they would most likely error when the count is more than the available faces. ... View more

I'm glad it looks like 2012 was the culprit. This was a new version of an old problem.  It's true articles could be found by doing a google search, but the results were mixed, varied and dated.  There were far more articles suggesting to install other versions of Visual C++ than the 2012.  This very post suggests otherwise.  I even ran each installer a couple of times prior to going through a "clean" install of each. Luckily, or unluckily for me, the solution became pretty clear when I installed Visual C++ 2012 last.  I'm sure tons of people came to the same solution on their own, but this seemed like as good a place as any to post.  It might even be moot already.  Microsoft could have pushed a patch already.  They do that sometimes. ... View more