How to crop photos in Gimp tutorial
I’m using the opensource Gimp to manipulate and edit my photos these days, and thought I’d put together a short tutorial on how to crop photos. I’m using version 2.4.7 but any 2* version should look the same as my screenshots. Follow the link above to get the latest Gimp download, just click on the big orange download button to see the various packages already compiled and ready for install. And hey, if your on Debian like I am, just go to your Terminal as super-user and do an apt-get install gimp at the command prompt or use Synaptic package manager, searching for Gimp.
Ok, now that you’ve got Gimp, lets rock the crop! Open an image you want to crop by choosing File | Open. Now, click on the Rectangle Select Tool from the main left toolbar, like so (click the image below to see a larger version):
Click and drag to select the area you want to crop to, or what you want the final image to look like. Let go of the click and you will see the dashed lines around the area. You can use the mouse, click and drag, to adjust these lines as needed. Just move your mouse to the edge of the dashed lines and the cursor will change to indicate you can drag and move the lines.
Here’s the important part – you have to invert the selection, so you can delete the area surrounding the final image you want. So, use the keyboard shortcut, CTRL-I (or you can select it off the menu by choosing Select | Invert) to invert the selection, so now you will have the area around the image crop you want selected. The dashed lines will now extend from the crop line to the edge of the image like this:
Next, we want to delete the now selected inverted area, so on the keyboard press CTRL-X to cut it away. I like to use Cut so I can undo if needed. Now you will have white space around the image crop:
Finally, to get rid of the white space and trim down to your cropped image, from the Image Menu (the menu right off the top of your image), choose Image | Autocrop Image
You will now have the picture cropped and can save accordingly.
Hello,
Thanks for the info on croping. I’ve been trying to switch from Photoshop to GIMP, and this really helps out.
Thanks again,
Charles
Thanks for the comment! I just posted an even easier way to crop pics in GIMP here: http://nancyfusco.com/wp/index.php/2009/06/easy-cropping-in-gimp/
Thanks again.
Several other websites were not helpful.
This is much, much further than I have gotten in my search for crop answers thank you! However, i am using an irregularly-shaped crop and “autocrop image” doesn’t seem to work – it just crops to a rectangle shape, not my irregularly defined shape. Can you help?
Hi Sheila,
Yup, you are correct. I’m guessing you want to just have the shape your selecting, so use the freeform selection tool to define your shape. Then, from the menu, click SELECT and INVERT (CTRL-I). Now you’ll see all the rest of the image selected. Press DELETE and you’ll be left with your irregular selection shape.
You rock Nancy, I just found gimp & started playing w/ it.
wow cool stuff, I will be reading more of your tutorials.
Trying to get christmas pictures printed before deadline.
Thanks again & have a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
Sherry from Missouri
Nancy,
You are awesome! ive been told by so many people thats its not possible to crop freeform shapes in gimp but i figured i would look at a couple more pages. Thanks so much this works flawlessly
This is super helpful, I’m also looking to crop multiple photos to the exact same size – I’m new to using Gimp so please forgive if this is a super easy thing that I’m silly to ask about
One of my favorite Gimp plugin’s is David’s Batch Processor, you can get it here:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html
I’ll do a quick article on how to use it to crop an entire directory of pics next.
Great question!