How to Batch-Crop Scanned Photos

Don’t even think about doing it manually. Two programs do it automatically.

Do you have tons of old family photos that you want to digitize? It is easy — even a basic home scanner can provide very good scans. Reconnecting with your past, rediscovering photos you haven’t seen for years, is enjoyable — even therapeutic. And it doesn’t have to be slow and tedious. You can speed things up by scanning multiple photos at a time. The bottleneck lies in cropping the scans. Luckily, there are easy ways around this.

Many scanners can automatically crop multi-photo scans:

Brother, Epson, Canon, HP — all have models that offer auto-cropping

Even if your scanner can’t auto-crop, or you’re doing camera scanning (which can also yield superb scans), there are ways to do this laborious, repetitive task really fast. Two options that you should check out:

Photoshop (For Mac and Windows) is arguably the best-known software for editing and manipulating photographs, but it also has a feature for cropping scanned photos. Open the scan, click File — Automate — Crop & Straighten:

Automatically cropping a multi-photo scan with Photoshop

The photos are cropped and saved as separate tabs. All you need to do is to review and save each photo, then repeat with the next scan.

Cropped photo. You can see five tabs at the top: The original scan, plus 4 cropped photos.

SnipTag by App Initio (For Mac): This software has two components — Snip (to batch-crop scans) — and Tag (to add EXIF and IPTC metadata tags).

When you launch the app, it opens in Snip mode:

SnipTag’s Home screen — Scans go on the left, and cropped photos are saved on the right.

Drag and drop all your scans into the left window, and the cropped photos are saved in the right window:

SnipTag can crop up to 100 scans at a time, each containing multiple photos.

The main advantage of SnipTag is that it can crop large batches, so if you scan a thousand photos — say, 300 scans containing 3–4 photos in each — you can crop them all with a few clicks. The app can crop JPG, TIFF, HEIF, PNG and BMP image formats. If you scanned at 300, 600 or higher DPI, the cropped photos are also saved at the same resolution.

Importing and cropping photos is free, so you can verify that the app actually works before you pay anything. However, to export the cropped photos, you’ll need to make a modestly-priced in-app purchase.

Auto-cropping Not Accurate?

Photoshop and SnipTag both do a good job of cropping. Even an 80% success rate means a huge reduction in time and effort, but following a couple of easy rules while scanning will hugely improve results:

1. Spacing between photos: Keep at least 1 cm (half inch) distance between photos, to enable the software to recognize them as distinct images.
2. Margin all round photos: When placing the photos on the scanner glass, keep their outer edges about 1 cm inside the scanning area.

Left (Wrong): No gap between 2 lower photos, and photo at bottom too close to scan’s edge. Right: Correct

Dates on Scanned Photos are Wrong?

Your scanner knows the scanning date, but not when the photos were actually taken. As a result, on importing the cropped photos into Photos, Flickr or any other such program, they’ll be displayed in random, not chronological order.

It’s important to correct the creation dates in scanned photos. Both Photoshop and SnipTag let you edit image metadata — dates, descriptions, keywords, locations and much else, for one or multiple photos at a time.

There you go! No more excuses to delay your photo scanning project!