Accessible MacOS image cropping tool

By PaulMartz, 2 October, 2024

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

As the subject says, I'm looking for an accessible image cropping tool. I used to use an ancient program called Paint Shop Pro, but I lost access to that when I retired my Windows 7 laptop.

Paint Shop Pro was accessible. Here’s how cropping worked. The crop dialog allowed specifying a new size in pixels, smaller than the original size. The dialog included fields to specify margins around that rectangle. For example, if I start with a 600x400 image and want to make it square, I would specify a size of 400x400 with left and right margins of 100. Or I could crop out the right one-third by specifying a left margin of 0 and a right margin of 200.

Are there any tools like this for MacOS? Even a command line tool would be awesome.

But any tool that requires me to draw a rectangular crop region is not going to work. And, from what I’ve seen of the built-in Preview app, drawing a rectangle is the only way to crop. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

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Comments

By Top Shelf on Tuesday, October 8, 2024 - 06:12

I've not needed to use it in a while but I've had success cropping with imageMagick on Linux commandline and believe there is a port for Mac or at the very least can be installed via HomeBrew.

By PaulMartz on Tuesday, October 8, 2024 - 06:12

Thanks for mentioning image magic.

I discovered sips, and it does what I want, but the command line arguments are kind of weird. To crop with an offset, enter the following.

sips inputFile -o outputFile -c newHeight newWidth --cropOffset offsetY offsetX

It's odd because the height or Y values are specified before the width or X values. If you leave off the cropOffset paramter and its arguments, I believe it crops around the center with even margins. The cropOffset parameters are pixels from the top left, but for some reason parameters of 0 0 does nothing. To crop an image to the upper left corner, you specify offsets of 1 1.

But it works, and it's built into MacOS, so I'm going with it.