Scan and Crop Old Photos from Albums using Linux Tools

We now live in this world of instant socializing by sharing our photos and tweets on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Sometimes, you want to relive your past memories from long ago (before the age of smartphones) and share these treasured photos on Facebook, Instagram or Flickr.  I've got great news if you're Linux user.  It's possible.  Just follow my instructions and you'll be on your way to digitizing photos from your old albums back when Kodak was the main player in capturing and processing photos.

1.  Hook up your scanner to your Linux PC.  (I'm using Linux Mint 14.)

2.  Scan the photos with Simple Scan.



3.  Save and rename the scanned image.





4.  Open Gimp Editor.



5.  Open the scanned image.



6.  Go to Tools and choose Select | Rectangular Select.



7.  Move the mouse pointer to upper left corner of scanned image and hold down left mouse button



and drag the pointer to the lower right hand corner of scanned image until it is completely outlined.  Release left mouse button.



8.  Go to Edit | Cut.



9.  Go to File | Close.  (Closes new Gimp session.)







10.  Go to Edit | Paste.  (Saves scanned image over first Gimp session.)



11.  Go to File | Export.



12.  Type name of file



13.  Select PNG format.



14.  Click on Export.





15.  After you close out of Gimp, the finished product looks like this!



Here's a video tutorial I did on this topic.