How to crop bulk images?

I went on a trip and came back. As expected there were tons of images lying in my storage device, be it my hard drive or mobile. These smart devices are certainly not as smart as we think they are. Had they been, they should have deleted or cropped the photos to the precision we want them to be.

Since these smart devices cannot do these basic tasks accurately, let me try to introduce you to these various ways using which you will be able to crop the bulk images that you just captured from many of your devices.

Before you start cropping them, you should be clear of some of your own requirements. From my experience, you can be in any one of the situations.

1. You have your personal photos that you clicked on a trip that you just came back from
2. You scanned your old photos or films (negatives and slides) in a flat-bed scanner(check out the scanner details here) or a few selected photo scanners, saving multiple images at a time
3. You scanned a book and realized later that the scanned image has two pages in one image

I think you got the difference from each of the different ways mentioned above.

Let us figure out the step-by-step process of cropping the images from each of the scenarios starting from the first one.

How to crop the captured images from your recent trip?

When you have the photos that you have captured from one of your recent trips, it is quite obvious that you would not want to crop them all at once. If you do that, you might lose some of the important objects like hands, heads, your favorite rock, etc.

This brings us to a situation where the only option we have is to crop each photo manually. We will be spoiling the photos if we crop them without manual intervention. Cropping manually consumes a lot of time.

So what do we do in such a situation? How do we crop the bulk images manually?

There are several options and one of the best options for windows users is to use the Windows photo Manager that comes with Microsoft Office. This is a lightweight software that comes in handy. 

How to use Microsoft Office Picture Manager Application?

All you have to do is to open the images in this software by right-clicking on the image and select open-with. Open-with suggests the application with which you can open these images. One of them would be Microsoft Photo Manager, with the logo as below.

By selecting that, you are asking the Windows Operating system to use this application to open the image that you just selected.

Once you open it, there are simple and extremely useful options that this application comes with. In this section, let us see how we can crop using this application.

You can see the picture manager opening the image below.

To enable the edit options you need to click on the “Edit Picture” option in the toolbar given inside the application.

Now a Menubar is displayed on the right side, under which is displayed some simple options to edit the picture. To crop, select the crop button from the right menu. 

Once you select the crop button, you can see right-angled icons on all four sides of the image with a straight line on the four-sided of the image. Moving these towards the image will fix the length and breadth of the image until that point.

You have to click on one of the icons and drag them towards the center of the image by clicking on it. A light line comes along the drag. It is until this line that you have decided to crop.

Once you are done with the selection, click on OK. The last thing we are doing before saving the image is to crop. To crop, you need to left-click on the hyperlink that says crop with crop icon something like this.

The beauty of this application is the ability to move to the next photo without closing the application in seconds. Click the arrow below the image and you are there in the next image. All you have to do now is to crop the image.

You can follow the same set of steps that enables the cropping of the images in an easy way. Once you are done with cropping the images manually selecting the edges and corners of the images, it’s time for us to save the images. 

Go to the File menu at the top left corner of the window like in any other application, and select the option “Save All”. That’s it. The application saves all the images that you have just cropped.

This is one of the easiest methods that we have found out in our experience, especially when you have images that have different places you want them to be cropped. A very light and useful application that comes with the cropping facility.

The second way of cropping is when there are multiple images that are placed on a flatbed scanner. This is quite tricky in the way that there are some protocols to be followed right from the time of scanning.

How to crop multiple images from a scanned image scanned using a flat-bed scanner?

In this section, let us discuss the cropping of photos that we have scanned using a flatbed scanner. This process starts from scanning. There are two ways of doing this.

• Using any scanner and a software called VueScan
• Using Epson Scanner and default software provided by Epson

In this section, we will talk only about the latter, i.e. scanning using Epson Scanner and the default scanner software provided by Epson. This software is pretty straightforward and integrated extremely well with the hardware, seamlessly.

Let us see how to use the software. Before that, we have to note the below points and follow them without forgetting them.

1. After opening the lid of the scanner, the photos have to be placed on the flatbed in such a way that the photos have to have some reasonable amount of space between one another
2. Close the lid of the Epson scanner once the photos are placed as mentioned in the previous step

Now that we are ready, let us head on to the software section of the scanner. Once you open the software, you shall follow the below steps to neatly accomplish the aforementioned cropping of the photos accurately.

1. Start by selecting the professional mode. This way we will see to it that the many options that Epson Software provides do not get missed out
2. By selecting the checkbox below the preview button that says Thumbnail view, click on the preview button to preview the images in the form of thumbnails already cropped. (If there is not checkbox as told above, don’t worry, once you preview the image there will be a tab that says thumbnail. Clicking on that tab you will be shown the thumbnail view
3. Based on the requirement, select the options that are available above the preview images like Colour Correction, Backlit Correction, Unsharp Mask, Dust Removal, Descreening, etc.
4. Now select the thumbnails one by one and adjust the rotation, color correction, etc. one at a time or together, again based on your requirement
5. Select the path, format from the button beside the Scan Button
6. After all the selections, you can press on the Scan button beside the Preview Button
7. This will scan and save the photos into the path that you have selected from the 4th step, which will already be cropped as seen in the thumbnail

You would have observed from the previous section that we directly scanned the multiple images into single images by cropping them right from the time of scanning. This is a pretty easy way to crop the images, especially when they are in multiples.

The last method is when you are scanning a set of books using a flatbed scanner or any other scanner for that matter. You realize at a later stage that the images are all scanned with pages from either side of the book.

This is when you have to follow the below procedure.

How to crop or split two pages from one scanned image?

At times, you might have to digitize your book collection. To do that the easiest two ways are:

• Scan them using flatbed scanners
• Scan them using a camera

Either way, the output might result in something like this:

You will have to either crop them manually or use this tool that is freely available and make use of it to split them all at once. The tool is called ScanTailor.

If you have gray or brown background in the pages that you have scanned, please follow this article and enhance the pages to look good.

How to use ScanTailor to Crop or Split the two pages of a book?

Before using the tool, let us understand that this tool is used to treat or enhance the pages that we have scanned from a non-destructive or destructive method. There are several simple steps that we can run in batches to arrive at enhancing the pages that are originally awkward and skewed.

Let us understand the process by following this step by step tutorial with images:

Now is where you can split or crop the pages that are together as in a book. You have to run through all the pages by clicking on the “Play” button. A middle line will be detected from each and every page revealing to us the true magic of this utility of separating the two pages from the line

The rest of the process can be followed by following this page. There you can find how you can enhance the pages further and arrive at deskewed pages that have a uniform layout with a perfect margin

This is how we can easily run the batch utility and split or crop the pages of a book that are scanned together.

Once it is cropped, you can convert the multiple pages to PDF, follow this article.

These are the ways how we can crop the different types of scanned images from different sources especially when they are in bulk.