Emily L. Ferguson : Under what circumstances would one wish to crop a lot of images at once? The worst crop I ever have to do is to 5x7 or 8x10, and I sure wouldn't expect any piece of software to decide for me what to crop off! lol, neither would I What this does is opens up images or folders you select (in a fraction of a second), you then specify the crop factor of choice based on specific or custom print sizes, - or even pixel dimentions. This presents you with a mask of the appropriate ratio over your individual images which you can drag or resize to where you weant the image cropped. Do this with each image then hit 'go', job done - and in absolutely no time I might add. You have a very large selection of options in the various settings for designated output folder, exif retention, standard and default settings etc.. Normally I'd do a comparison test with photoshop or the likes for speed, but 2 reasons I havent bothered with this - one, everyone has a different workflow in PS so time comparisons are pointless and 2. the little program is so bleeding fast I really don't think it's worth attempting a comparison! It's certainly not for everyone but if I had a folder with lots of images designated for printing at say an event, I could very rapidly evaluate, frame and crop each image and have that side of things done before (or after) doing any colour, sharpening or other image manipulations elsewhere. And I mean rapidly.. As it stands I have much of my image processing done in batch files by Irfanview (resize.bat and such - simple text files that initiate complex procedures with vast numbers of images) witout me even seeing an image pop up, this is another step I have to do manually each time with each image, but this Jpegcrops program does it rapidly with minimal input from me. Actually to use the term automatic cropping is probably misleading.. but it's close to what it feels like regrading how little effort I have to put into it. I have a few batch files that do a lot of my imaging work for me - such things as when I pop a card in my card reader and click say the CDRST.bat file - it launches a s DOS interface and: Copies them to a specified folder (images), in a subfolder it creates Date stamps by name each file Resizes all to 800x600's and 240x480's at 80% image quality - both to seperate folders labelled 'email' and 'small' Sharpen these smaller images Ceates a Thumbnail sheet (if the printer is on, it prints this 'contact sheet', if not and I dont want it I delete this from the print queue) Copies all this work to another drive for backup Opens Iranview and begins a slideshow of all the images, with cute fades - I can pause this, click the > or < button to move forward or back at speed or just simply look over the images. pops up th directory after so I can name it appropriately Adding a line to this *.bat file I will now have it open up Jpegcrops and load all those images so I can then crop to 6x4's or 8x10s as needed, or simply close the program if I choose not to use it. - it takes less than 1/2 a second to load so it's no biggy It's amazing how much image work can actually be handled in seconds or minutes by number crunching without actually having to view the images, and how high the output quality can be using programs that CAN handle jpegs losslessly. Certainly beats spending 1/2 an hour or more doing it manually with some other programs.
