Graphic utility, mac, advice please !

[iainjh]

Hi

hoping there's some mac users here!

I have a load of jpg's that I need crop to a fixed size ie 640 x 480 or cut out odd sizes such as 740 x 300, for website etc

on mac I presently area screen grab by preview and then using OS X (control shift 4 or whatever it is) to drag out and save a screenshot of that size

what I want is a utility to grab a fixed sized area and remember what size that is, akin to a masked area so I can position it over the Image and save the cropped/ masked Image out

i don't presently have photoshop , which seems overkill and I'd have to remember how to use.

So! Mac, fixed area screen grab, masks. A 'lightweight' app if possible.

anyone can please help?

tia

Iain

 

[MartinW]

I honestly have no idea if it can do what you're asking or not, but since you mention Photoshop, there is an App called Pixelmator that is a very well respected Photoshop competitor. It is on sale at the moment for £10.45 or was the other day, hopefully it still is, but it's not expensive even at full price. If you google it and find the author's website then you can download a fully functional 30 day trial so it might be worth a look to see if it can help?

I've been lacking an image editing app since Pixelmater beta 1 (then free) went into production and became chargeable. I didn't use it often enough to buy it until I noticed it on sale the other day

 

[jman]

what I want is a utility to grab a fixed sized area and remember what size that is, akin to a masked area so I can position it over the Image and save the cropped/ masked Image out

How many times to do you have to perform such screengrab? Is it a one-shot job or you need to do it in future?
If it's a single job of (say) 20 images, bite the bullet and do it manually.

Otherwise, if you feel confortable with the command line, there are some neat Linux packages (ported to OSX) that do the job: the keyword here is "ImageMagick".
You can use the "import" utility, ex.:

import -crop 200x200+0+0 +repage test.png

Will create a "test.png" from a screenshot cropped to 200x200 starting from [0,0] of your screen.

If you google up "imagemagick import crop", you should find other examples.

Sorry for the geeky answer, but that's the approach I would take to get the job done quickly

 

[MartinW]

Thats not a bad idea you know, and if desired, it should be trivial to wrap the command up in a bit of AppleScript which can then even make an APP of it. I've used ImageMagick for millions of images as part of my day job and while it is incredibly complex sometimes to work out what you need to do as it has so many options, once you've sussed it, it's pretty good and reliable. And it looks like jman has done the hard work for you there already

 

[iainjh]

excellent, thanks all.

Ive got 50-60 to do and 4 or 5 each week. Thing is its not a regular resize and because they are product images the origin and area i want isnt ever in the same place

but great tips, I'll go try out, thanks again

 

[NinjaRabbit]

It's been a while since I've used Mac OS X, but (if I'm understanding your requirements correctly) it seems that the built-in utility for this sort of thing is still present. Have you tried using Grab for this?

 

[iainjh]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion, I didnt know that was there! macs what a pain

Ive now tried grab, it will do an area capture but only from absolute coordinates, so it doesnt work that way, doesnt allow to to do a fixed resize px x px or masked area. I'm trying out pixelamator (will try tmo)

thanks again!