Software for auto-extracting individual portraits from yearbook page?

June 22, 2015 5:15 PM

I'm hoping to automatically extract the individual portraits from scans of yearbook pages without having to manually crop and save each photo. Each page has about 20 portraits. I'm using Windows 8.1.
posted by Bushmiller to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I can't help you with Windows, but you could get part way there with Sketch for the Macintosh. You'd create a document with rectangular slices positioned in a grid corresponding to the locations of the pictures on each page. Then you'd bring in the pages one at a time and export the slices. It would still require manual processing per page, but not per image. This would only work if every page has the same layout of pictures, and if all the scans were the same dimensions. It doesn't auto-detect anything.

If you're interested in taking this route, I can play with it a little more and make sure it works.

(By the way, Sketch is a great vector design program, useful for lots of different things and fun to use.)
posted by alms at 7:38 PM on June 22, 2015

The software that came with my $60 Canon scanner will save multiple photos to individual files if it detects enough space between the photos on the flatbed. Not sure how it would handle a year book page though.
posted by LoveHam at 7:39 PM on June 22, 2015

How to batch separate & crop multiple scanned photos gives you two options, GIMP and Photoshop. I used the GIMP steps (GIMP is free!) and it worked well. I had two pictures that were very close and they came out as one picture, but it still saved me time.
posted by soelo at 7:37 AM on June 23, 2015