wrote:

I Ducked Imagemagick and Windows GUI and found this:
http://codecpack.co/download/ImBatch.html
I'm more of a Mac person and have not tried it but...

Thank you both for helping out on the quest for an aspect-ratio crop in
Windows freeware, and for staying on topic!

That links to ImBatch 5.8 http://codecpack.co/images/ImBatch.jpg
"ImBatch is a free batch image processing tool for Windows based on the
popular ImageMagick, a software suite to create, edit, compose, or convert
bitmap images. The program handles all popular image formats, such as BMP,
TIFF, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, PIX, JP2, J2K, PSD, WDP, HDP. Also ImBatch
is distributed with 3 official plugins (DCRaw, ImageMagick, JBig), that
extend the number of supported image file formats. When all those plugins
are enabled, ImBatch support more than 100 image file formats, including
RAW ones from the many digital cameras. Using ImBatch you can resize,
rotate, watermark photos, flip pictures, crop images, convert colors, set
or remove EXIF/IPTC Tag, adjust Hue, Saturation, Lightness parameters, add
a shadow in the inner border of the image, add filter effects to your
selected photos in a batch mode and more."

I'll test it out and report back at the bottom of the thread, where the
summary is on topic for the aspect-ratio crop.

So far, these have been tested (or suggested):
Back on topic, the known Windows aspect-ratio freeware apps a
# Fastone (the aspect ratio crop is the best - on top of the picture)
# Microsoft Photos (the aspect ratio crop is sadly below the picture)
# Irfanview (the aspect ratio crop is cryptically accessed with Shift+C)
# The GIMP (the aspect ratio crop is, like all things Gimp, unintuitive)
# ImageMagick (the aspect ratio crop is, like all things IM, batch)
# ImBatch (this seems to be a GUI-based front end to ImageMagick)