Jpegcrop

When taking a picture, there is nothing more annoying than someone who stumbles in the frame and ruins a perfectly good shot. If you only caught him in a corner or edge of the frame, then the picture is not lost due to image cropping. If you don't consider an advanced image editor a good investment, or if your system is too slow to run it, Jpegcrop is a more than suitable alternative. It features more than one tool to help you crop an image in a number of ways.

To get the software, you only need to download a 632 Kb file. There is no installation process to go through and you will not have to unzip it either. You can just download it and run it at once. Its low system requirements make it possible to run even on a slower, outdated machine.

If you know how an image editor looks like, then Jpegcrop will seem familiar. You can load an image file either by clicking a toolbar button and browsing for it or by simply clicking and dragging it from a standard explorer window. The image itself will be displayed on the main area of the interface. It is possible to load more than one picture and you can switch between them via navigation buttons, found beneath the toolbar.

The software lets you perform basic transformations like rotating or flipping an image, reducing it to greyscale or setting a zoom level. Regardless of function, any tool can be selected by clicking its designated button on the toolbar. Cropping an image is obviously done by clicking and dragging a rectangle. Since the software was designed specifically for cropping, there is no need to select a rectangle tool. From the moment you load an image, you can go right ahead and draw that rectangle. For better precision, you can activate a block grid which will be placed over the image. Using the buttons on the toolbar, you can have the rectangle snap to the grid.

Another way to crop an image is to draw a mask, using the same rectangle tool. After drawing the mask, if you right click anywhere on the image, the context menu will display two options. One for moving the frame which you drew and the other for defining one. The second option will bring up a small window where you can set the width, height and offsets of the frame.

You would think that it is pointless to download a software which only crops an image, but you would be wrong. There is something the program does on its own and you will find it very useful. When cropping and saving an image, it will be recompressed. Regardless of what quality level you set, the image will be slightly degraded. Jpegcrop will limit the crop to a fixed aspect ratio and it will maintain the existing compression. This means that the image will not be compressed, so there will be no degrading.