Okay, I'm a noob, just like my nickname says, and therefore I can't post the copy of explanation I've posted elsewhere, but I think it may interest some GIMP users, even if it's somewhat "spammy".
If you have tons of pictures to crop, and cropping them don't require pixel-perfect precision, you could save time by just painting over a gallery of thumbnails, roughly covering the borders or key interest areas to be cropped/preserved. It can be either with filled rectangles, or just loose squiggles with the pencil or ink tools (the harder the brush, the better, I suppose).
So, this preliminary script already allows you to do that. First you have to put all the images to be cropped in a folder (with just those images), and then create an ImageMagick "montage" of the pictures to be cropped. You'll open this montage on GIMP, where you do your selection/crop marks on a transparent layer over it.
What the script uses is this layer with the marks, saved isolated as a png.
It's quite analog to painting said squiggles or marks on a different layer, over a single image, leaving on only the opacity of this squiggle/rectangle layer, and then performing GIMP's "autocrop image", then switching the opacity of the layers again. While this process doesn't make much sense for a single image, I feel it's quite handier to crop a ton of images, over the thumbnail composite.
tl;dr: Googling "Batch-cropping with ImageMagick + GIMP. Script helper(s), in development" should bring as the first result a blog post on "linuxquestions", which in turn has a link to the original post on the ImageMagick's forums, which apparently isn't listed in google yet. On either of them there are some illustrations of how it goes, and the code itself.
It's pretty rudimentary (and quite small, really, even though it's more ugly than it's small), and, even though it does "the main thing", it still has some small temporary file leftovers and whatnot (220x220px gifs, one for each image cropped).
I thought of posting it here because perhaps there are more people than me who'd like to use this method, including people who can actually code those GIMP's "add-ons" that would make the whole process even more streamlined.
Sometime along the way there may be some improvements on the syntax of imagemagick's commands, which I suspect isn't the most efficient possible right now.
|