What is the easiest way, on OS X, to automatically crop folders of digital photos to a square?

December 11, 2005 5:42 PM

What is the easiest way, on OS X, to automatically crop folders of digital photos to a square?

I've followed advice of people on here and found on google to no avail. Most luck i had was using EasyBatchPhoto but the website I am uploading to didn't like the resulting photo's. Looks like it didn't write the photo's in a standard format that they are expecting.

What i am doing: Using Flickr's new partner Qoop to build some of those Lifeposters and bounded books of photo's. The resulting images uploaded fine to flickr but Qoop couldn't even show them like images that didnt go thru this workflow were. Advice? Better way to do it?

I have imagemagick installed via darwinports but can't figure out the syntax to just do a center based crop? What would be the syntax to batch a whole dir of varying size and oriented images to a single square dimension?

posted by joshgray to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Best answer: photo Drop?
posted by jaimev at 5:51 PM on December 11, 2005

Tried GraphicConverter? A copy may have come with your Mac.
posted by kindall at 6:08 PM on December 11, 2005

using EasyBatchPhoto but the website I am uploading to didn't like the resulting photo's

files on the mac OS have two parts, a data fork which is the content of the file, and a resource fork which includes lots of whiz-bang doodads that make the mac OS so pretty -- the image thumbnail is an example. i've never used EBP but usually in OSX software there'll be an option that's something like "save for web" that saves only the data fork, which makes it look like a regular ol' JPG file. have you tried looking for that kind of thing (or maybe an option to turn off that says 'save resource fork' or somn?)
posted by sergeant sandwich at 6:13 PM on December 11, 2005

Response by poster: hmmmm dropphoto is doing the same. You're probably right about it not writing all the files right. Any more ideas? Can i then open these files up and re-save them as a batch in a different program so it writes all the files correctly? Geez.. that's a hack..!
posted by joshgray at 6:44 PM on December 11, 2005

There is a folder action that will crop photos. It is relatively easy to modify the script that it uses to check which dimension is smaller, and crop the other to that dimension. I don't have to write it tonight, but I'll do it soon if no one else gets to it first.
posted by alms at 7:40 PM on December 11, 2005

From a terminal command line, perhaps you can do a

sips -g all filename.jpg

for files that do upload correctly for you, and those that don't. Maybe there's a characteristic of the file that the uploader can't deal with. I'm leaning towards a problem with the uploader program, as opposed to the files you are generating.
posted by jaimev at 7:52 PM on December 11, 2005

Response by poster: Files look exactly the same except using sips except for the dimensions, btw.. Still no luck.
posted by joshgray at 9:18 PM on December 11, 2005

Best answer: If you're using 10.4, this is exactly what Automator is for. Fire it up and then use the "Crop Images" action in the Preview app, with "Scale to Short Side".
posted by trevyn at 10:02 PM on December 11, 2005

Response by poster: /me bangs his head on the desk

Turns out the flickr API doesn't take 'private' pictures into account even though you are logged in on the qoop webpage.

Sorry for the trouble - i did learn some nifty new ways to convert. Previously i never successfully used automater, that thing rocks...
posted by joshgray at 10:20 PM on December 11, 2005

I had problems with the automater Preview actions destroying images. I ran it to scale to 1/2 size a folder full of images once, and about 1 in 4 of them ended up being a 36k stub with ~4 lines of the original image. Didn't use it much after that. At the very least, if you do, set it to make copies first.

ImageMagick and the Python Imaging Library are what I use almost exclusively for automated image processing nowadays. However, Photodrop, which I had not heard of before this thread, looks awesome.
posted by boaz at 8:29 AM on December 12, 2005