Mac How-To’s
How to Batch-Crop Scanned Photos
Detect and extract individual photos from scans. Fast!
Photos scanned with a scanner or camera require cropping to remove the unwanted background (See the black / white borders in the scans below). Cropping is slow and tedious, especially if you have scanned a lot of photos — but luckily, it can be automated.
To crop a scan manually, you will open it > Mark photos’ borders with your image editor’s cropping tool > Crop > Assign file name > Save. If the photos were scanned at an angle (Like the B&W photo above), you must also rotate them before cropping. That’s a lot of work, if you have hundreds of photos.
We’ll show you how to crop and save then all in a couple of minutes.
Let’s take a quick look at the typical photo scanning workflow. Although our main focus is on speeding up cropping, we’ll also briefly address some of the other processes that merit attention.
Photo Scanning Workflow
A photo scanning project involves several steps:
Most of these tasks are easy, even fun — Unearthing long-forgotten photos and re-living old memories can be quite therapeutic! The time-consuming processes are scanning, cropping 😬 and adding metadata.
Tips for Photo Scanning
There are several DIY ways to scan photos. You could use:
- Desktop scanners: You can buy a Canon, Epson or another good flatbed scanner for $80–200. Another option is a batch scanner with auto feeder — it’ll be faster but can only scan loose photos, and requires all photos in a batch to be of the same size and in good condition.
- Camera scanning: You can get superb scans of photos, negatives and slides with a DSLR or mirrorless camera. You’ll need a macro lens, light source and a camera stand. It’ll be slower than with desktop scanners.
- Phone apps: Fast and easy. Apps such as Pic Scanner (iOS) can scan and crop multiple photos at a time. Google’s Photoscan (Android, iOS) has a glare removal feature that’s quite good for scanning glossy photos. Scan resolution is more than adequate for viewing and sharing online.
For desktop scanners, set the resolution at 300-400 PPI (pixels per inch) for regular (4"x6") and 600 PPI for smaller-sized prints. This is plenty for home users. Higher PPI will create unnecessarily large files.
With a flatbed scanner or camera, speed up scanning by capturing multiple photos per scan or entire album pages. Use plain background, space photos 1/2" apart, keep all four edges of the photos fully within the scan, and avoid placing photos at an angle. All this will help ensure accurate auto-cropping.
Save the scans in folders — either chronological, i.e. by year or decade (e.g. 1960s, 1970s etc.) or event (Angie’s Wedding, Hong Kong 1997) or location — depending on how you plan to arrange your scanned archive.
Auto-Cropping Scanned Photos
After scanning with a desktop scanner or camera, the next step is cropping the photos. Some scanners’ bundled software has rudimentary automatic cropping capability, but it’s usually slow and not very accurate.
We will discuss three programs that automatically detect, crop, if required de-skew (straighten), and save photos extracted from your scans:
Photoshop (For Mac and Windows) is better-known for image editing, but it also has a lesser-known feature that can be used for cropping multiple photos from a scan. Open a scan from the folder where you saved it, click File — Automate — Crop & Straighten:
The photos are cropped and saved as separate tabs. Review and save each photo, then repeat with the next scan.
You can also write a script to run Crop-and-Straighten on all the photos in a folder, and save the extracted files in another folder.
SnipTag (For Mac): This software has two components — Snip (to batch-crop scans) — and Tag (to add EXIF and IPTC metadata tags).
Open SnipTag in Snip mode, drag and drop all the scans from a folder into the left window, and the cropped photos are saved on the right side almost instantaneously. All you’ve to do now is to export them to your archive.
A key advantage of SnipTag is its batch-cropping ability. If you’ve scanned a thousand photos — say, 300 scans with 3–4 photos in each — you can crop all with a few clicks. The app supports all popular image formats. The cropped photos are saved at the same resolution at which they were scanned.
You can import and auto-crop any number of scans with the app’s free trial version, but will need to make a modestly-priced in-app purchase to export the cropped scans. Ideally, download the free version, see their starter tips and scan in accordance with those to get the best results.
GIMP: This free, open-source raster graphics and image editing program has a plugin called DivideScannedImages that can be used for cropping and straightening scanned images. Requires some technical skills and a learning-curve but works.
Don’t Forget Metadata
Metadata in scanned photos, e.g. Creation Date (EXIF Date/Time Created) and Location (GPS coordinates) will always be wrong until you manually correct it. If you don’t do this, the scans will appear in the wrong sequence, not in the correct chronological order, on your computer and in all photo management programs such as Photos for Mac or Windows, Flickr etc.
You may also want to add titles, descriptions and keywords to your scans. Both Photoshop and SnipTag let you edit these details in batch mode.
Preserve Your Legacy
Old family photos are among our most cherished, precious assets. Printed photos deteriorate over time, cannot be shared, and once lost can never be replaced. If you haven’t yet scanned yours, do it soon. With the automation tips provided above, it’s not really that difficult.
