Divide my photos into separate files

November 12, 2008 11:58 AM

Is there a faster way to split a photo into pieces and save it as individual files? (possible photoshop batch question)

I have about 300 photos that were scanned using a flatbed scanner. To save time, they were scanned 8 at a time, leaving me with about 35 jpegs that each have 8 photos on a page. I want to split these into individual files for a slideshow, so using photoshop CS3 I have been selecting each individual photo out of the page of 8 photos, opening a new document, pasting the photo, and saving it into a folder. This is obviously taking forever. Is there a faster way?

posted by mjcon to Technology (5 answers total)

You could use slices to cut it up however you want and then go to Save for web and select jpg for your output.
posted by i_love_squirrels at 12:40 PM on November 12, 2008

If you're comfortable writing scripts, you could do it with ImageMagick.
posted by demiurge at 1:02 PM on November 12, 2008

Seconding imagemagick Easy to plug together with a bash script. The basic format will be something like:

convert -crop 200x100+300+400 image.jpg image_cropped.jpg

See also
posted by chrisamiller at 2:35 PM on November 12, 2008

Best answer: Might as well give you a script too. Once you play with one image and find the proper coordinates to crop at, for each of the images, you can do something like this from a mac/linux/cygwin command line:

for i in *.jpg;do
convert -crop 200x200+0+0 $i.jpg $i_cropped1.jpg
convert -crop 200x200+0+200 $i.jpg $i_cropped2.jpg
. . .
convert -crop 200x200+400+400 $i.jpg $i_cropped8.jpg
done

(Adjust the parameters appropriately)
posted by chrisamiller at 2:39 PM on November 12, 2008

If the files are really big and the slices are really small, imagemagick can be a really bad idea. Something that only has to read the image file once, like a python script using PIL (e.g.) can be much faster.
posted by PueExMachina at 4:50 PM on November 12, 2008