Steven Zahm@ Rashed
Tile and Tile Plus do not use the images settings in the admin. At one time they did but because of the design of these templates they required specific settings so they would not break. So, both of these template force settings that are required to make sure the design does not break. An update to Connections would not change this functionality. Did you update Tile Plus from an older version too?
I suggest adjusting the template image settings to better accommodate your landscape images and/or preprocess your images before you upload so you can achieve your desire cropping.
To adjust the templates image setting you want to use the image_width and image_height shortcode settings. Something like so:
[connections image_width=130 image_height=100]
The reason some are link and some are not because when a link was entered for an entry the “Assign link to image.” option was checked.
I hope that helps!