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I'm looking for a program to reduce the time I need to prepare images for different social media platforms. Basically I have one large image, which I manually crop (i.e. I select the area to be cropped with the mouse) and resize, so that it looks aesthetically pleasing and has the image ratio and pixel measurements optimal for each social media platform. Basically, I'm looking for a program, which allows me to perform these steps without any extra steps:

  1. open image
  2. select preset, which defines image ratio and image size (both in one go), e.g. a preset named "Twitter" with image size 1024 x 512 and a ratio of 2:1 (i.e. 1024:512)
  3. select area to be cropped manually with the mouse
  4. crop image to area selected in previous step
  5. save image

There are of course plenty of programs, which can handle cropping and resizing. However, when handling a lot of images, every extra click takes unnecessary time so I'm looking for a program which can handle cropping and resizing in one go.

I'm looking for recommendations for all platforms (Mac/Linux/Windows).

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  • I have not used it in this detail, but that sounds like a perfect job for ImageMagick. You can run it from the commandline, and e.g. use a shell script with the "presets", passing it the original image name. ImageMagick can resize (which is what I use), but also crop, insert, and much more. On Linux, it can be found in the standard repositories.
    – Izzy
    Commented Jun 2, 2017 at 5:45
  • While imagemagick could do the resize and auto-cropping to fit that size perfectly, I think that OP wants to manually crop ([...] so that it look aesthetically pleasing).
    – pLumo
    Commented Jun 2, 2017 at 6:28
  • Yes, I need to manually select the area to be cropped.
    – simon
    Commented Jun 2, 2017 at 11:53

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If you are willing to use a web-based tool and jpg or png input is fine, you can try out this graph in the GSN Composer, which is an online tool for visual node-based programming:

https://www.gsn-lib.org/index.html#projectName=ForumBatchCrop&graphName=InteractiveCropAndResize

The graph allows manual interactive cropping of all images that are uploaded to the project and can save each result automated to different output sizes. However, it does not store the selected region and you have the additional steps of uploading and downloading the image batch.

enter image description here

If you do not want an to use an online tool, any other scripting language can help you as well (provided that you have a command that allows selecting a rectangular region in an image).

For example, in matlab the command would be "imcrop" or "getrect": https://www.mathworks.com/help/images/ref/imcrop.html https://www.mathworks.com/help/images/ref/getrect.html

In Python (with OpenCV) the command would be "cv2.selectROI()": https://www.learnopencv.com/how-to-select-a-bounding-box-roi-in-opencv-cpp-python/

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