A discussion on IRC about the new crop tool revealed that there are
lots of different use cases for cropping. They're all important, and
it's important to make sure there's a list of them so that the new
crop tool will handle them.
Here's a start. I hope people will jump in and fill in the details
for the ones I'm unclear on (the constrain case and the zealous
case) and add any other use cases I've missed.
- Crop to selection.
(Handled fine by Image->Crop Images. This might be the most common
case, and the one a lot of GIMP newbies will use until they discover
the others.)
- Crop a small area of any size out of the middle of an image.
(Handled fine by old and new crop tools.)
- Crop an area of constrained aspect ratio, letting you move or
resize the crop rectangle to choose the right area.
(I don't do this very much, but people ask for it all the time,
and maybe I'd do it if it were easier. Someone who needs/uses
this should speak up with details on how it should work!)
- Crop an area out of an image, retaining one or more existing
edges.
(Handled well by old crop tool; difficult in current CVS.
Making the crop tool stop at the image edges, like the old
crop tool did, would fix this.)
- Crop a single layer image to the visible boundaries.
(Handled by Autocrop, not by the crop tool.)
- Crop multiple layers to the visible boundaries.
(In 2.2 it was roundabout: select all, click in the image, click
From Selection, then click Auto Shrink. In CVS there's currently
no way to do it. I'd like to see the Autocrop menu item handle
all visible layers (is there some reason it shouldn't?, or see a
similar item, like "Crop to Visible Layers", which does that.)
- I assume there's a use case for Zealous Crop, but I'm not clear
what it is. When I try it I usually end up with an image with a
bunch of blank layers because anything with information has been
cropped away. Can a Zealous Crop user speak up?
Okay, crop users, tell me what I missed!
...Akkana
