IrfanView has an extremely niche feature that literally no other image editor I’ve found, not even Photoshop, can do, called Remove/Insert strip. I literally use this regularly for work and have donated to the dev because of it, but would like to try to find something open-source that does this if possible.
Let’s say you have an image which is comprised of 3 rows: ABC (there aren’t literal rows with lines, but we could just say the top 33% of the image is A, the middle 33% is B, and the remainder is C).
IrfanView can crop out just B (or any similar interior portion) and have A and C touch each other, in a single menu click after you’ve selected the portion-to-delete. It can also do this as columns, if ABC were treated as vertical columns instead.
It can also inject X amount of pixels in either height or width at any specified location in the middle of the image of whatever color you specify. This is also powerful, as I sometimes have to replicate part of an image elsewhere in the image (they’re sheet music), so being able to generate that placeholder and the immediately putting actual contents in the injected space is really helpful.
These are insanely creative features that I literally can’t find any other program capable of doing, open- or closed-source. Any guidance towards an alternative would be great!
Have you considered creating a macro in any image editor that supports macros and assigning that to a button / keyboard shortcut?
gimp certainly has macros and scripting features. Maybe this will help: https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Automate_Editing_in_GIMP/
You can still edit a mask / selection with the regular UI, then trigger the cut/merge process you desire based on that selection.
I was just thinking of exploring that, yeah! Thanks for the nudge. “Parasites” is certainly an interesting word to appear on that webpage…
Came here to say this. Just make a macro of anything you’re doing regularly. As much as I’d like to get away from Adobe, photoshop has some really good macro functionality.
imagemagick is the swiss army knife: https://usage.imagemagick.org/crop/
Are there any GUIs for IM?
I was going to say imagemagick as well. You make a simple script to do what you need such as the crop and connecting together then set it up as a right click action in dolphin or whatever file manager your using.
You could also put in a feature request to some of the open source projects if nothing else
True! I wonder which are really active nowadays (for the greatest chance of it getting implemented)…
If you have your requirements try them all couldn’t hurt
Techsmith - Snagit can do this (partially)Paid app, but has the feature to remove a strip of an image. No idea what the latest version does. The version I remember was years ago. Presumably has been enhanced since then…
Oh, man, a paid subscription? I’d rather stick with Windows, in that case…
Sounds like you need a document editor
These are all PNGs, though! To be specific, I work regularly with sheet music (especially sheet music with no source files, so it’s PDFs that I adjust into PNGs and manipulate from there: mostly deletion of unwanted staves and whitespace).
See, that’s a major missing detail. There’s surely far less OCR software available for such information recovery … though it’s not clear what the nature of the information is inside the PDF. Is it just image information embedded in the PDFs, or is the actual symbol notation stored therein?
Fine, I edited it into the post. Still, OCR fails miserably at sheet music in my experience. These files are a mix of people scanning papers and PDFs coming directly from file-download websites. I can’t have a single mistake from an OCR converter in my line of work.
How about something like a page editor? You can create a page with various elements, and manipulate them. Have a look at Scribus (for Linux) or other apps similar to Adobe Indesign.
Thanks, I had tried Scribus for something unrelated to this, but found it to be horribly counterintuitive in terms of how to even get started. I think it had a major update somewhat recently so I suppose I could retry it…
I mentioned Scribus but I never worked with it. I did use MS Publisher and InDesign because mixing images and text in a document editor was a pain. I used it for creating “collages”.
That makes sense. The extent of my desktop-publishing work has typically involved bifold programs, so I use LibreOffice Writer’s “brochure”-printing mode (which automatically sets every 4 pages as double-sided quarters of 1 sheet) because I can’t stand how bad element selection in MS Publisher is. I’ve never used InDesign and want to avoid Adobe as much as possible since my org is already neck-deep in Microsoft’s subscriptions as it is.
Don’t get me wrong; Scribus can clearly make a lot of beautiful stuff. I just can’t even start to figure it out; I gotta find video tutorials or something.
