Is there a software to automatically crop a scan of multiple images?

Question

I want to digitize my old family albums using a scanner and there are lots of photos in them. Thus far, my method has been to scan 4 images at a time and then manually cropping them in a simple editor like Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery. This has been pretty time consuming as each scan is followed by 4 crop operations. Scanning each image individually would possibly be even more time consuming.

Is there any software or simple plugin (preferably free) that does this job? The best solution I have found is in Photoshop, but that's an overkill. Is there a similar feature for one of the free photo editors like Paint.NET or GIMP?

Answer 1

If you don't know the crop boundary then you can use Fred Weinhaus's multicrop script (this script also uses Imagemagick). The script also handles different photo sizes and rotated images.

Example (book covers):

Scanned image (input.tiff):

multicrop input.tiff output.tiff

Result:

output-0.tiff:

output-1.tiff:

Answer 2

Is it a safe assumption that you know the crop boundary and image size for complete batch? If that is the case then you can use convert tool from Imagemagick.

Something like:

convert orig_file.jpg -crop <w>x<h>+0+0 1.jpg
convert orig_file.jpg -crop <w>x<h>+0+<h> 2.jpg
convert orig_file.jpg -crop <w>x<h>+<w>+0 3.jpg
convert orig_file.jpg -crop <w>x<h>+<w>+<h> 4.jpg

Where <w> is original_image_width / 4 and <h> is original_image_height / 4

More crop usage with convert.

Answer 3

I stumbled upon a GIMP script called Divide Scanned Images that worked pretty well for me. It has an input interface and even supports batch processing of files. It's not entirely foolproof, and you may need to adjust the "Abort Limit" and\or "Background Sample Corner" settings to get the script to work properly.

I had tried the ImageMagick multicrop script without much luck, and it may be due to the fact that I'm trying to use the software on Windows with cygwin.

Answer 4

Check out AutoSplitter at http://autosplitter.com/ It does just that. Divides, splits, deskews automatically. You can also adjust the cropping/rotating parameters if you want.

Answer 5

Its not free, but VueScan is one of the best pieces of scanner software around. Its been in business for a long time, and the software is the most feature rich I have used. It has a multi-crop mode where you can set multiple crops on a single scan. Your trick is to get the photos in the same place each time.

Answer 6

Absolutely free, very light, and powerfull for simple (and sometimes more complex) tasks : IrfanView

Answer 7

After having to Google this issue myself, I decided to write some instructions on how to do this with either Adobe Photoshop (if you already have that), or with GIMP (for free). GIMP turned out to work better in my case. Complete easy-to-follow instructions can be found here: http://wp.me/p1YGyn-s9

Answer 8

Try PicaJet FX - it's optimized for scanning and cropping multiple images at once. Thanks to 3D acceleration support for the basic operations like image cropping and rotation are very fast.

http://picajet.com

PicaJet FX is a product of our company.