Easy Cropping For Digital Photo Frames

Digital picture frames seem to be quite the popular gift these days. I even gave my 80 year old grandmother one, and she absolutely loves it. They're easy enough, you just copy photos over to a memory card and then power on the frame. It automatically starts playing a slide show of the photos. However, to get the full use of the picture frame, you have to do a little optimizing of the photos beforehand.

The problem is that most digital cameras take photos in a 4:3 format, while the digital picture frames are usually 4 inches high by 6 inches wide, or a 6:4 width to height ratio (a relic left over from the days of film). If you put the 4:3 photo onto the 6:4 frame, you end up with black bars along the sides because it has to shrink the image vertically to make it fit. This ends up wasting a lot of screen real estate that could be used for displaying larger and more vibrant photos. Your only option is to crop out some of the unneeded image from the top and bottom before moving the photos over. For instance, the photo shown here could easily get rid of the black bars on the side and fill the entire width of the frame by removing some of the irrelevant portion of the image at the top.

There are many ways to crop photos, and most are very easy. For cropping just a couple of photos, applications such as the very expensive Photoshop will do. The free Picasa or GIMP work just as well. But, when you need to do a large number of photos at once, it becomes very cumbersome to open each photo and select the area that you want to crop. I found it taking an hour or more for me crop around 50 photos.

Knowing there had to be a better way, I searched and stumbled upon a very handy free tool called JPEGCrops. It really couldn't get much more simple or intuitive. You run it, click the Open Images button and select all of your images. All of your images are displayed vertically with a white outline showing the default crop selection. You can click and drag the window around to set the crop how you'd like, then scroll down to the next photo and do the same. Below each picture is also a drop down box so you can change the size of the crop. You can even select a Free crop mode where you can drag the box to whatever size you'd like.

View of the main screen:


To save a little time, you should figure out the ratio of your picture frame. Some are non-standard. I measured mine and it actually came out to be 3.5 inches by 6.5 inches. This is very close to a 4in x 7in photo, which just happens to be the default for JPEGCrops. Measure your picture frame, and see what it's ratio is. After you've figured that out, I would go into File and Preferences. There under the Basic tab, you can Add or Edit different Aspect ratios, and then select the Default Aspect. Set the Default Aspect to whatever your frame's ratio is. This will save you from having to use the drop down box under each photo when selecting the area to crop.

View of the Settings Page:


Now, go click and drag the crop window around to your desired selection on each of your photos. Some photos you may not want to crop because it would ruin the shot. You can exclude those photos easily using the drop down selection. Once you have everything set up like you like, at the bottom right of the program you tell it the folder where you want the output files to go. Tell it where you want to save all of the photos, then click the Crop all Images button and the program will do it's thing. You have the option of hitting Crop on each image manually, but I prefer to let it do them all at once in batch mode.

Don't worry, your original files are never harmed in any way. By default, it outputs separate files with a "_Cropped.jpg" name at the end. The originals remain untouched.

This tool makes it extremely easy to crop a lot of photos to a desired aspect very quickly. Just recently, I cropped around 200 photos and it only took about 15 minutes. They looked great and filled the entire screen on the digital picture frame. Give JPEGCrops a try if you have a similar need.