Scrapbooking with Cropper and PhotoSheet

Are you into scrapbooking? You might find some of the tools here useful. I have a few friends who are into scrapbooking and a few of these tools are handy for getting photos to the right size for that album page project.

Cropper is designed to do two things: 1) give you control over what part of a picture makes it into the print, and 2) allow you to whip through a folder full of photos in record time.

For your scrapbook project, let's say you have a picture of your child sledding with her friend's family. The theme for your scrapbook page is not her friend's family; instead it's the priceless expression on your her face that you'd like to focus on.

In the old days you'd take the 4x6 print from the drugstore and cut out your child, leaving you with a tiny oddly shaped 1x2ish picture of your child's face.

Now with software you edit the digital photo, use a 4x6 setting in the cropping tool to select your child, save the crop, and send it to the drugstore's web page to be printed at the 4x6 size. This effectively enlarges your child's picture to be the significant image on your album page.

Obvious, right? Cropper lets you whip quickly through a lot of photos and pull out the bits of the images you want to include in your album page. Pick the aspect ratio you want (1x1, 4x6, 8x10), use your mouse to draw a rectangle, and click "save crop".

The above example with the 4x6 image is pretty straightforward. Of course your album pages might be a little boring if all of the pictures on all of the pages were the same size. But how do we create the variety? If your photo printer deals in fixed print sizes (and usually 4x6 is the cheapest option), how do you get a couple of 4x3 prints, or maybe a bunch of 1x1.5 prints (for those pictures with characters at Disneyland)?

PhotoSheet creates a composite from a bunch of individual pictures. The final size of the composite is one of those sizes your drugstore probably prints at. And you get to pick how many pictures go into the composite. If you put 4 on a 4x6 page, each will be 2x3. If you put 2 on a 4x6 page, each will be 4x3. With 12 pictures each ends up 1.3x1.5.

Nifty. Now back to your page about your child's priceless expression. You have a few other pictures containing elements you want to include on your scrapbook page as accents.

1. First, decide which elements you want to pull out.


2. Next, run Cropper and select the aspect ratio closest to your target size.


3. Now drag the folder (or a photo from the folder) into Cropper and start cropping.


4. When you're done, drag the pictures you want to use as accents into PhotoSheet. Experiment with different image counts until you see what you like. Hit Start.


5. Now send the pictures created by PhotoSheet to the printer, and get your scissors ready.

PhotoSheet (formerly MakeWallets)

Time for a name change - the ol' Wallet Generator does a bit more than just make wallet photos.

I have a 4x6 photo printer and several photo collage picture frames in the house that hold 4x6 photos. Sometimes there are more photos than can fit in the frame, and the MakeWallets software came in handy for fitting multiple pictures into a single 4x6 slot in the frame.

The problem was that the wallet software was designed to make sheets of images that would be cut into separate pictures, so it rotates the images to fit and doesn't offer any control over layout.

This version fixes those limitations.

• you can see what the sheet will look like
• you can rearrange the photos on the sheet
• you can disable rotation of individual photos.

Wallet Photo Generator

What's it for?

Save money buying wallet photos of your digital images. If you've ever uploaded photos to a photo printing service, you've seen the option for wallet prints. Typically wallets will be printed on a 4x6 or 5x7 sheet, and you can expect to pay a premium for this sheet. This is annoying since the paper used is exactly the same paper used for much less expensive single photos on 4x6 or 5x7 paper.
For instance one photo printing service I sampled when writing this page offers the following pricing:

• 4x6: $0.15
• 5x7: $0.99
• Wallets: $1.79 (a sheet of 4 copies of the same image at 2"x3" on a 5x7 print)

Whoa. Wallet photos cost 80 cents extra per sheet!?! So I originally created the MakeWallet utility to save money - by pre-creating the wallets in a 4x6 image I can get wallet prints for as little as $.15 a sheet, which is a huge discount!
Good with your personal photo printer too: Recently I picked up HP's PhotoSmart 385 4x6 photo printer. This printer can generate a 4x6 sheet of wallet prints, but only if you're printing images directly from a camera card. Since I usually print from Windows, however, I'm lacking some benefit from this feature since Windows' built-in wallet printing only works on 8x11 sheets on traditional letter-size printers. Once again, MakeWallet comes in handy.

How do I use it?

Easy...

1. Run the application from the Start Menu
2. Find the image you want to make wallet images for
3. Drag the file into the "Files" section of the application
4. Decide whether you want a 4x6 image or a 5x7 image and click the appropriate option
5. Click "Start". You'll see an hourglass while the program is doing its work.
6. After a moment Look in the directory you dragged the image from. You should find a file called something like "Wallets 4x6 (DSCN0944,DSCN0945,DSCN0946,DSCN0947).jpg"

That's it. Upload the generated file to your favorite printing service or send it to your photo printer.

What other cool things does it do?

Rotate and Crop: Images are automatically rotated and cropped to fit the 2x3 aspect ratio.
Run from Shortcut Menu: Right-click a .jpg or .png image in Windows Explorer and choose "Make Wallets" as a shortcut to run the program quickly.
Fill a sheet with image or many: Give it a single image or multiple images to generate a sheet filled with identical images or a sheet of different images. The program decides how to fill the sheet depending on whether you give it just one image or more than one.

• If you give it more than 4 you'll get multiple sheets generated, one for each set of 4.
• If you give it more than 1 but not a multiple of 4 (like 3 or 6) you'll end up with empty space on one of the sheets.

The cool thing about this feature is that if you're sending out multiple wallet photos to friends and family you can save yourself time and rubber bands by sending everyone a sheet of unique photos they can cut themselves, rather than cutting them yourself and dividing up all of the tiny pictures
Make a sheet of 16 1" x 1.5" images: This is a great tool for the scrapbooking person in your house. Just generate a sheet of wallet images, then generate a sheet of wallets for that. You'll end up with 16 images to a sheet, and when cut out they fit nicely in a slide mount or are easily cropped to interesting shapes to add more interesting photos to a scrapbook page. You can feed the output of the MakeWallet software back through it as many times as you wish. Good luck with the scissors though - cutting 64 itty-bitty pictures from a 4x6 image isn't my favorite way to pass the time...

Updates

Support for variable number of images: You can choose to put 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, or 16 images on a sheet.
Support for 8x10 wallet sheets: You can now generate a sheet of up to 16 images for a 8x10 sheet.