Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Batch Cropping Photos

Like most people nowadays I take a lot of photos, using either my phone or a digital camera. As I don't trust electronic storage mediums and also I like paper copies, I want to have many of the photos printed.

The problem is that photos taken by modern cameras/phones don't match good old paper photo width and height (aspect ration). The solution is to crop (i.e. cut away parts of the image) that are not essential, to fit my photos to the paper.

This is relatively easily done, you can
1. Let your paper photo provider cut out a default selection (the center part of the photo usually), which is mostly ok except when the interesting part isn't centered in your image. Or
2. You go through each image an select the part you want and crop it manually, either using a program like Picasa or Photoshop, or a program provided by your photo service (like JapanPhoto CEWE which is horrible to use and navigate)

This works ok for a few images, but once you pass 100s of photos, it takes too much time.

I luckily found a great program written to help with just this thing, JPEGCrops (http://ekot.dk/programmer/JPEGCrops/). And it's free!

JPEGCrops lets you add all the images you want to crop (only JPEGs though, it crashes with PNG), select the aspect ratio (e.g. 10x15 for regular photos in Norway), and move the box around inside each image to quickly and easily select which portion you want. The program is very fast both in loading images as well as cropping. You can also select an alternative output folder so that you don't mess up your full scale images.


The program is version 0.7.5 beta so could crash in some cases (like when trying PNG, so don't do that) and doesn't seem to be in active development. But it does just what is needed and I'm very happy with the result.

If the link goes away, contact me and I'll send you a copy. :) Thanks to Toke Eskildsen for such a great program! :)

Note: If you want to select a different aspect ratio for all your images, you can change the default by going to File -> Preferences -> Default Aspect. Then all images added after that should have the new aspect ratio set.

Note2: I use FujiDirekte (http://www.fujidirekte.no/), a Norwegian photo printer which I'm very happy with, they also have quite reasonable prices I've found from my investigations. Very easy and useable online interface for ordering. They even notice which aspect ratio I probably want for each photo. For example if I have cropped some images to 10x15 and some to 13x18, those sizes are listed correctly while they are "wrong" for other size, so the 10x order option for a 13x18 cropped image would be 10x17 or something. Not matching any of the aspect ratios I have cropped to.