The question of the week (3)

A couple of comments ago, Alan asked what the best way is to crop a collection of photos to the same square ratio. Well, Alan, I don’t know if it’s the best way, but I’ll tell you how I do it after the jump and if other readers know of other or better ways, they can comment on that in… the comments!

The way I crop a collection of photos to the same aspect ratio is that I crop one of them to the desired (e.g. square) aspect ratio and then I select the photo I just cropped in the filmstrip (it should be selected already anyway) and I shift-click to include the other photos of the collection that should get the same crop. Then I hit the Sync… button found in the bottom right of the right panel.

I choose ‘uncheck all‘ to quickly get rid of any unwanted settings to synchronize (we only want to synchronize the crop) and then check ‘Crop’. And then I just hit Synchronize in the dialog box and all the other pictures will have that square crop. Of course, you might want to reposition the crop afterwards for each picture individually. You can do so easily by selecting the picture and hitting the R key, which brings you straight to the Crop tool…

If you have to import a number of photos and you find that all over again, you  wind up giving them a square crop using the previous method, you might even make a preset in the develop module that consists of nothing but a square crop:

1. take any picture from your library
2. give it a square crop
3. hit the plus button on the presets panel
4. save the preset, making sure you check only the ‘Crop’ setting and name it accordingly.  (After that, you might want to undo the crop to the dummy-picture)
5. During the import process, you then just choose – at the bottom of the import dialog box in the ‘Information to Apply’ part, under ‘Development settings’ that preset that you just made and your photos will wind up pre-cropped (non-destructively of course) in your Lightroom Catalog, saving you the effort to do it later.

P.S. Sorry folks for the lenghty text without any screenshots but I am on a photo-journey through Bali, Indonesia at the moment and, contrarely to the bananas, WIFI does not grow on trees here yet, so I chose to reply to this question in a WIFI-less cybercafe where I don’t have Lightroom. So this one is from memory