Can I make Affinity automatically slice, straighten and crop a batch of photos? How?

[johanna]

I'm new to Affinity and I'm currently in the process of digitalising my family's old photos – thousands of them, in a few different sizes. I want to scan them in a high resolution and to save time I'd like to put three of them in the scanner at a time and then after scanning all photos preferably have Affinity automatically 1) find the three photos in each images 2) slice each of the three photos into a separate image 3) straighten up the photo in each image 4) crop each image so there's no whitespace around the photo. Is this doable? If so, how?

 

(My scanner can of course auto crop, but it doesn't do it perfectly and I only think it works with one photo at a time.)

[MEB]

Hi johanna,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

No, Affinity Photo can't do it automatically for you.

[carl123]

1 hour ago, johanna said:

4) crop each image so there's no whitespace around the photo.

This part may be doable in a macro which you could then batch run on other photographs

(it would depend on the image being processed)

[johanna]

Thanks so much for your quick and friendly replies!

 

36 minutes ago, carl123 said:

This part may be doable in a macro which you could then batch run on other photographs

(it would depend on the image being processed)

 

Do you mean that Affinity could "see" the whitespace and crop the photo to the correct size automatically or would I need to specify a ratio beforehand? I guess both alternatives would be fine, better than nothing.

[v_kyr]

No it doesn't detect any superfluous whitespace areas in image boundaries automatically, but it can resize and crop bulk images with the help of macros and batch processing to predefined sizes.

[carl123]

If the white space is clearly defined around the main photo (without any of the photo's white edges bleeding into the white space you want to remove) then a macro can be made to remove that white space and effectively then crop to the size of the remaining image

An example or two of the sort of image with whitespace you are dealing with would help

[v_kyr]

Well also for a bunch of images (thousends as you said) you may better take something specialized and explicitely made for such automatically slice, straighten and crop etc. workflow. There are some tools and other script based solutions available, which explicetely deal with that theme, you can try some of them out. - Like for example ...

• AutoSplitter
• Gimp Script - How to batch seperate & crop multiple scanned photos
• ... and so on ...

[johanna]

Thanks for all your replies.

 

Since I have a Mac, I think my best shot might be to just download Photoshop Elements and use its Divide Scanned Photos function. I will try to use the batch script at https://forums.adobe.com/message/9287004#9287004

[v_kyr]

10 hours ago, johanna said:

Since I have a Mac, I think my best shot might be to just download Photoshop Elements and use its Divide Scanned Photos function. I will try to use the batch script at https://forums.adobe.com/message/9287004#9287004

If you want to use PSE that script looks Ok so far. - But usually this script isn't needed since PSE (as the bigger PS brother) have such functionality already build in. See here for PSE too (for PSE choose Image > Divide Scanned Photos). Also here for the bigger PS.

Another option would be to use ImageMagick and use this script  (scroll down on page) or this multicrop2 to perform the separation.

However, as often there are many roads which lead to Rome!

[ToMaTo]

Photoshop and PSE can both crop multiple photos scanned together (as can Irfanview and Imagemagick), but if you have thousands of photos, you'll need a script to batch crop them. Otherwise, cropping and saving a large number of "multi-scans" will still require a lot of time and repetitive effort. Mac users can use an app called SnipTag: You scan up to eight photos at a time with any scanner or camera in JPG, PNG, TIFF or BMP formats. Import multiple such scans into the app, and it crops the entire batch. The app isn't free, but I found it worthwhile for a large family photos scanning project.