Comments on: Automatic Image-Chopper?

Question: Automatic Image-Chopper?

electric_counterpoint — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 13:42:47 -0800

I need an automated way to slice 'n' dice some images into regularly sized chunks.

Here's the deal: I'm making a mosaic-style sidebar for a website I'm working on. There are 6x7 squares arranged sorta like a calendar, with each square cell being about 20px to a side.

I want the background of each square to be 20px. square chunk of a larger image, such that it looks like a mosaic when assembled together. To do this, I need a program that will automate the process of getting 42 20px^2 chunks out of every image I use. It would need to do these things, in order:

1) Resize the input image to the proper size.

2) Select the first 20px^2 region (from the top left, natch)

3) Save it with some regular naming scheme (e.g. n+1.jpg)

4) Grab the next 20px^2 region (to the right), do the same thing.

5) Repeat until the region #42 is grabbed and saved.

Is there any freeware program to do this? Barring that, some sort of batch file I could write? I could do the whole project by hand, but it would be mind-numbing. I've got Paintshop at my direct disposal, and could get to a copy of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. if necessary. Thanks!

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:14:12 -0800

ImageMagick can do this. One command (resize) to resize and one command (crop) to generate all the tiles.convert -resize 140x120 myoriginal.jpg mynew.jpg convert -crop 20x20 mynew.jpg mytiles.jpg

By: ph00dz

ph00dz — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:14:26 -0800

What platform are you on? It seems to me that you could probably do exactly what you want with a bit of PHP and GD, but that may or may not be beyond the scope of what you wanna do...

By: fake

fake — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:15:08 -0800

Have a look at the Photoshop Slice tool.

By: fake

fake — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:15:48 -0800

Just to be clear, you'd just make a grid of slices and choose "Save for web".... it does almost everything else you want. It will even make a table.

By: fleacircus

fleacircus — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:22:11 -0800

Have you thought instead about loading up the entire image, then using the CSS background-position style to change the 20x20 area for each tile?

This would probably load faster than 42 separate images anyway, but it won't take care of your step (1).

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:25:33 -0800

(BTW: ImageMagick is available for Windows and Unix - including Darwin - and what you'll get out of that pair of commands is a bunch of files named mytiles.jpg.0, mytiles.jpg.1, ..., mytiles.jpg.4)