The Crop Function Made Easy

[Michael Dsouza]

I use xnview MP to crop my pictures, it would help a lot if a standard sized crop box appeared
on the pictures and i simply move it where I want with the mouse then press Shift + X to save
and move to the next picture

[cday]

I use xnview MP to crop my pictures, it would help a lot if a standard sized crop box appeared
on the pictures...

Appeared when, in what circumstances?

...and i simply move it where I want with the mouse then press Shift + X to save
and move to the next picture.

You might take a look at the existing Crop, Save & Next option on the toolbar that appears when Edit > Crop... is selected after making a selection, which may go part, or even all the way, to meet your need when cropping a series of images with the same settings...

[jkm]

And speaking of the toolbar that cday mentioned, on the left you will see a drop-down menu of pre-defined crop presets. Using the ... menu you can define new crop presets.

If you define a crop preset in terms of physical size (inches or centimeters) then when you select that preset from the menu, the sized crop box will automatically be drawn on your image.

The size of the crop box defined in inches/centimeters will take into account the DPI of your image. (In other words, for an image set at 300 dpi, a 2-inch x 2-inch crop box would draw at 600x600 pixels.)

Define the appropriate size crop as I describe above, and then when you start your cropping session, just do an Edit->Crop, select your crop preset from the menu, move it, and then follow cday's advice: click "Crop,save,next".

You select the crop from the menu once at the start of your session, and then you just move it each time and you never have to actually draw it.

Which is pretty much exactly what you asked for.

[cday]

Thank you jkm for your very useful elaboration to my post...

If Michael's need is to be able to crop images at random times rather than a series of images, another approach could be to create a simple macro assigned to a key stroke, which I think could be fairly easily done using one of the freeware key stroke recorder utilities that are available, some quite simple to use for basic operations.

[jkm]

Well, your post was very helpful and I suspect probably what he wants.

If he were wanting to crop just some images instead of every one in a sequence (which is what Crop,Save,Next will do) then I would think the easiest thing would be to use the "Next File" and "Previous File" command, either on the View->Navigate To menu, or by using the buttons for them on the toolbar in the viewer. (They are present by default, the forward and backwards arrows)

Then after he clicked "Crop,Save,Next" he could just click the Next File button repeatedly to skip to the next file he wants to crop. The crop box will remain on the image when he skips using the Next File button, just like when "Crop,Save,Next" is used.

Or, before entering crop mode, he can save any selection (Edit->Selection set size->Save selection or cmd_selectionSave) and then apply that selection to any image with cmd_SelectionRestore (which is C by default).

So that makes it easy to apply a selection with a single keystroke (and then crop with one more).

[cday]

@jkm: I just edited my previous post without realising you were online, suggesting the possibility to crop images in a predefined way at random times using a simple macro, see above. Can you suggest possible simple utilities for that, would likely be platform-dependent?

[jkm]

AutoHotKey and X-Mouse Button Control (XMBC) are two of the best for Windows. I'm not the best source for recommendations on simpler tools than those.