Today's soundtrack is Amon Amarth: Fate of Norns, another incredible album from the kings of viking-themed melodic death metal.
Today's post isn't going to be a typical one. This afternoon after work, I had a large-scale project I needed to complete: taking hundreds of screenshots from a learning resource, cutting each page apart into three or four sections each of various sizes, and pasting those sections into Word.
I first tried making an equivalent number of copies of the file as there were sections to be clipped in each one, then cropped each file individually. It worked, but it was not efficient. I did a bit of googling and found that Photoshop would let me use a slice tool to do exactly what I needed. Awesome! Only one problem - I didn't have an Adobe CC subscription. I took a look on the Adobe Canada website and found that they offer 7-day free trials.
I signed up for the photography package trial, got Photoshop installed, went to give it a go, and was really impressed with how well it worked...for the first three pages. After that, it repeatedly crashed. I tried changing the file format of both input and output, tried compressing the file before exporting, tried changing the export optimization settings, all to no avail. I searched around online and found that it's been an ongoing problem in various iterations of Photoshop; the earliest mention of the issue I found was in 2012, with no official tech support responses available. Hmm.
Next, I tried a work-around: again using Photoshop, I cut the file into layers, then exported each layer as an image. I initially tried exporting in .jpg format, but found that this just made the non-layer areas white, while retaining the initial image size. So that was no good. I tried exporting as .png as well, which worked great...except that every single time I exported, I had to re-define the directory that I wanted the files saved to. Not a big deal in most circumstances, but I was going to be working with several hundred files, so mucking about with that kind of thing was not feasible.
Then I had a thought. What about Photopea? I've been using them for everything ever since I found them (up util that point, I'd been using the Pixlr editor, but it's riddled with ads, relies on Flash, which doesn't run half the time, and is slow as anything). Well, I'm sad to say it, but even Photopea let me down today. It refused to export the files unless the prefix was the letter "e," which seems to me incredibly arbitrary, and at that point I couldn't even deal with it, so I just used Paint and cropped each file manually. It took over 5 hours, but I got it done.
Thanks, Paint!