One liner multi-image cropping

A simple entry for a simple way to solve a common problem.

I often have a lot of scanned images, documents usually, that have unnecessary white-space, and other artifacts around the edges due to limitations in the scanner software or issues with the scanner itself. Normally I use the gimp, and can correct orientation problems, colour issues and cropping very easily. But this is too much mouse work in my opinion when you have 50 images and all need a similar simple cropping. So I fiddled around in the shell a little and came up with this one-liner:

for file in *.jpg ; do echo "Cropping $file" ; \
convert -trim $file trim/$file ; \
convert -crop 1692x2190+4+4 trim/$file crop/$file ; done

OK. Not really one line, but I swear I did write it on one line :-)

What it does is three things:

• loop over all image files, and for each:
  
• trim all white-space off the edges, bringing all images to the same basic size with the top left of the real data at the top left of the image
• trim them down to a specified size, in this case a little smaller than US letter size. I cut 2 pixels off each edge just to remove some noise commonly found on the edges of scanned images.

And here is a simple set of thumbnails of the results:

original image with many artifacts

first trim removes continuous whitespace

final cropped image at letter size with edges removed

It took about 10 minutes to figure out this script, 20 seconds to run it on all 50 images, and then 20 minutes to write the blog!