Cropping Outside the Lines...

Responding to a couple of minor feature requests today.

• new option to allow the crop area to expand slightly outside the image. This allows you to squeeze more of an image into the crop as long as you're willing to live with the "letterbox" look (black or white bars on top/bottom or left/right).


• improved protection for your original images - you can choose to not apply rotation or tags to the original image when rotating or tagging for crops.


• new aspect ratios - 8x12 (technically redundant with 4x6 and 2x3 but I had a little space on the screen to fill up...) and freeform.


• shortcut for tagging crops as you make them - if the option for applying tags to the original file is off, you can double-click the tag after selecting a crop area and the crop will be generated immediately with that tag in its filename. This is handy for quickly extracting images of individual faces from a group portrait.


• minor bug fixes

The new options are available in the updated Options UI! Click the Options button to get there. Here's a peek (click on it to see a bigger version).

The expanded crop area behavior is especially handy if you're ordering prints and want to make sure the interesting parts of the picture are included in the print. Of course you can stick with the current behavior where the crop area will stay inside the image. We don't always want those letterboxes after all... Just select that "keep the crops inside the image" checkbox on the Options screen.

Here's a peek at the expanded crop area. When the crop is saved, the image will have black or white bars on the sides (depending on what was chosen in the option dialog--I chose black because the background of the flower photo is black). I went with just black and white for the letterbox effect - let me know if you would like other color options (drop me email or hit the comment link).