A simple CLI tool to detect and cut out empty areas of an image (screenshot) in order to make it smaller without resizing its content.
The program simply scans for whole pixel columns and lines which are identical to their neigbours. These columns and lines can be cut out from the image, no information will be loss, but the image will be smaller and more compact.
The program itself only a CLI tool, which tries to detect empty areas in a specified PNG image, then calls - with a bunch of parameters - ImageMagick's convert utility, which is doing the actual job.
You may assign a hotkey to yout script, which makes a screenshot of a window, passing through it on shrinkshot, and saves it.
To make it work, first, you should install ImageMagick:
- MacOS:
brew install imagemagick - Debian/Ubuntu Linux:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick - etc.
Also, don't forget to checkout the upng GIT submodule:
git submodule update --init --recursive
$ shrinkshot screenshot.png result.png
To make it work, first, you should install ImageMagick:
- MacOS:
brew install imagemagick - Debian/Ubuntu Linux:
sudo apt install imagemagick - Windows:
choco install imagemagick
Then you may pass the parameters to convert utility>
If any problem occurs, shrinkshot prints error messages to stderr.
Just start compile.sh. Requires GCC to be installed.
You can build Windows executable on both Windows and Unix systems
(not tested on Linux). All you have to do is install MinGW and
launch compile-for-windows.sh on Unix systems or compile-on-windows.bat
on Windows.
Also, you may use the executable provided in bin/ directory.
- Only tested on sample images you can found in the
test/directory (converted images are also included). - Not tested on Linux distros yet.
- If you make a screenshot by marking the cut region by hand (sometimes called snipping tool), empty area detection may fail on the background image. A simple solution is just simply ignore 3-4 pixels on the borders, this hack will be applied soon.
- Noisy regions are not detected.
It would be great to split the image to more regions (e.g. horizontal stripes), and cut out (same width) areas from it at different (horizontal) positions.
The most known use case of it is the status bar, which should be cut separately:
This image has no columns to cut (only lines):
---------------------------
| content content |
| on left on the |
| right side |
| |
| |
| status |
---------------------------
But it should be:
----------------------
| content content |
| on left on the |
| right side |
| |
| |
| status |
---------------------
The "status" line occupies small vertical size, so it's a good candidate to handle differently from the main area.
Empty areas marked with numbers (vertical only):
--------------------------- --
| content 111111 content | |
| on left 111111 on the | | large area
| 111111 right side | |
| 111111 | |
| 111111 | --
| 22222222 status 222222222 | | small area
--------------------------- --
The program should detect main area (primary target for shrinking), and try to shrink same amout from smaller areas.
ShrinkShot is now a CLI tool for. It should be turned to an easy-to-install solution for making shrinked screenshots with a hotkey.
I don't want to turn it to a boxed software with printed manual, but the distribution should be more user-friendly:
- Linux: provide a shell script, which can be assigned to a hotkey. Probably release it as a
.debpackage. - MacOS: have no idea.
- Windows: have no idea.
The idea and some sample images come from a question issued by @Thomas on the Software Recommendation (StackExchange) site.
The actual conversation is done by ImageMagick.
ShrinkShot is using UPNG library to load and parse PNG files. It's included in the repository as a GIT submodule.
Use it as you want. I'll be happy if you integrate it and mention it in the credits.