I am working on a site at the moment, that requires the admins of the site to be able to upload pretty much any size of image, I then need to find a way to get the image down to the size required for the front end of the end the site, all this needs to be done without know what size of image the user is uploading, but the image always needs to scale to 209x293 without looking awful.
Is this even possible?
You should argue with your client, to forget that rule(accept ANY image), and accept rather, only images in that proportion, or better, you can use a tool to crop the image, forcing the user to crop an image in your needed resolution.
Jcrop is a library in Jquery which can help you a lot if you want to create that cropping feature.