That's why you didn't need to worry about cropping with your old film camera. The entire photo printing industry (around well before the digital age) has adopted the 3:2 standard. It's because film cameras use the 3:2 ratio. Why does the printed image have a 3:2 ratio when cameras uses 4:3? Why can't the printers use the same ratio, so the cutting isn't needed? Your 4:3 photo resized in a 3:2 ratio print. Most people don't like that, so printing shops prefer the crop option. Now while that keeps the whole of your original photo, it adds ugly bars. The other way to do it is to resize the photo, so you see white edges on the left and right. The yellow rectangle is the 3:2 image that will be printed. In order to fit a 4:3 image into the 3:2 print, the photo needs to be cropped. The reason your photos are printing with the top and bottom cut off (cropped out) is because the aspect ratio for a point-and-shoot camera image is 4:3 whereas the aspect ratio for a printed photo is 3:2. The aspect ratio of a 12 by 9 inch rectangle is still 4:3. The same ratio applies even if the size of the image increases. If you were to do the math, the aspect ratio of this rectangle would 4:3. Let’s say you have a rectangle that is 4 inches wide and 3 inches high. Now let’s move onto something a little more complicated. In that case, the ratio of the width to the height would be exactly 1:1. If it were, the width would be the same as the height. Let’s assume your photo were perfectly square shaped. The Aspect Ratio is simply the ratio of the width to the height of a photograph. “What the heck is an aspect ratio?” you’re wondering. It also has a lot to do with a fancy thing called an aspect ratio.
It all comes down to the difference between point-and-shoot and film (and digital SLR) cameras.