: How do I make rectangular photos square? I have a pack of rectangular pictures (some landscape, some portrait) but I need them to be square. I know how to use imagemagick for resizing and

@Mendez620

Go to befunkydotcom and that might help solve you're problem. Replace 'dot' with '.'. Dont worry this is not a scam just a photo editor site.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Reiling762

In general you have three basic possibilities:

1) Increase your picture's dimensions (on the shortest side) to make it square (As Lauren suggested)

2) Crop them to be square (As DA01 suggested)

3) Stretch your images to fit a square

All three of them have their pros and cons of course.

The first one makes it square, but it adds useless "information".

The second technique takes away some of your picture, and you may lose some "information".

The third one keeps everything but it makes it look distorted and strange.

There are of course more complicated options such as extracting your object and then standardizing a background or faking the background by extending it.

If you are the photographer, then I would suggest setting up a system when you take the pictures of your objects and leave plenty of room around your object so that you can crop it square later.

However, if there as the pictures you are using, then it shouldn't be a hassle to use either of the above techniques.... here's an example of the first three, respectively.

Extra background:



Cropped:



Stretched:



In addition to that (again, given that these are the actual pictures) it's important to remember what you're using these images for. If you're selling furniture, it's best that you don't stretch the image in any way, as it may make the furniture seems smaller/larger or more out of proportion than it really is. The second technique works great if you can simply crop out the background, and if that's not an option then adding a background to expand the image may be your best bet.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Speyer780

I don't know how to do it in imagemagick in particular, but here's how I'd do it in Photoshop:


Find your widest dimension. For sake of argument, we'll say 600px.
Find your tallest dimension. For sake of argument we'll say 600px.
Create an action: Canvas Size, Width 600px, Height 600px, fill
background with white.
Batch.


Your photos will have extra white space in one dimension or another, but they will all be square.

Vote Up Vote Down