This "feature" should be redesigned and corrected as it is essentially cropping carefully curated images without rhyme or reason. Squarespace seems to be doing a lot of two-steps forward and one step back....
I am resizing images to have a large white background and they, too, are having the product area cropped off. Applying one aspect ratio setting to all of the images in a batch is not solving the issue either and is, indeed, a waste of time. I want the entire product to be displayed as customers expect to see an entire product before they buy it. If I go to edit the photo, it shows the proper image area, so why can't that area be displayed on the screen?