Welcome to the Drag-n-Crop web page!

What is Drag-n-Crop?

Drag-n-Crop is a simple utility, designed to make it quick and easy to reformat images. With it, you can specify an aspect ratio or specific image dimensions that are to be used to create new versions of selected input images. If the output aspect ratio is different from the aspect ratio of the input image, Drag-n-Crop provides an easy, direct user-interface allowing you to choose what portion of the original image should be preserved in the new version.

How does it work?

The user interface is simple: you choose a directory that contains images to be cropped and/or resized, a single image from the directory is displayed, allowing you to drag the area to be left in a new version of the image. With a single key press or mouse button click, the new version is written to a directory and the next image is displayed.

Drag-n-Crop can read any image format supported by the underlying platform (Cocoa on Mac OS, .NET on Windows), but will only write JPEG format files.

What's this going to cost me?

Drag-n-Drop is free. I'd love to encourage people who find it useful to contribute US$5-10, depending on how much use you get out of it. But for the moment, I don't really have a good way to accept payment. So instead, if you found the program useful please just remember to send email saying so. Of course, feel free to comment on what you liked or what you think could be improved.

I tried it, but it doesn't do enough!

Drag-n-Crop has, by design, limited functionality. It's not intended to replace full-featured image editing programs; rather, it's supposed to make a very specific task go very quickly. That said, there's still room for improvement even within that constraint. Here are some features planned for a future version:

• Zoom. Currently, the image is always displayed at the user-selected output resolution. Given the original motivation, small devices like LCD picture frames and handhelds like phones, PDAs, etc. this isn't all that unreasonable. But being able to scale the image on screen independently of the actual output settings would be nice. (Tip: for now you can workaround the lack of the feature by cropping without scaling, and choosing a target size that has the correct aspect ratio but fits on the screen; once the images have been cropped, you can then resize them using your favorite batch editing tool, or even just run them through Drag-n-Crop again, scaling without cropping the second time around).


• Rotation. Sometimes you have input that hasn't already been rotated to match the camera orientation. Other times the input has already been rotated, but you want to view the image on a device that you can easily rotate physically and on which you'd prefer to take advantage of the full resolution available. In either situation, it would be useful to be able to rotate the image at the same time you are cropping it.


• Batch mode. Yes, the whole point of the program is to deal with situations in which batch processing isn't appropriate. However, sometimes you want to rerun the exact same cropping parameters but with a different output size (e.g. generating thumbnails). A command to re-process the current directory without user input would be handy and easy to implement.


• Resizable crop rectangle per-image. While the main scenario the program is intended for is where you've already got an image that is pretty much what you want, sometimes you might want to crop the image in both dimensions rather than just one.


• Saving crop selections. Some people might find it useful to revisit the crop selections they made for a given directory of images. Saving those settings in a file with the images would provide that.


• ??? Who knows? You may find something about the program that could use refining, or a feature that would be useful to have without going outside the basic intended scope of the program. Please feel free to provide feedback and if I agree with you, your feature request could make it into the program!

What are the system requirements?

Macintosh: While the Universal Binary version is compiled with OS X 10.4 as the target, I believe it should work fine on OS X 10.3.9 and possibly even earlier versions, but don't have a way to easily verify that. If you are running OS X 10.3.9 on a PowerPC and don't want to bother with the Universal Binary, you can download a version compiled specifically for OS X 10.3.9, PowerPC (244 KB).

Windows: Drag-n-Crop requires Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0 or higher. The installation program should offer the option to automatically download and install .NET for you, but if for some reason that doesn't work, you should be able to use Microsoft's Windows Update web site to install it. If for some reason that doesn't work, you can download the installer for .NET 2.0 directly from the Microsoft web site.

Many thanks to Kevin Palivec for drawing the wonderful dragon art. Be sure to check out his web site for more great dragon drawings!