For archiving scanned images of family photographs, I modified some scripts to use with Gimp to speed the process along. This post will explain how to install these scripts to the correct folders in order for them to work.
First, You need to install Gimp photo manipulation software. This is similar to photoshop, but it is free and open source. Gimp is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Since I run Linux on my computer, I can’t easily install photoshop, and Gimp does just as well once you learn to use it. Instructions for downloading and installing Gimp can be found on their downloads page.
If you want the script to automatically attempt to straighten your individual images automatically before saving them to file, you will need to install the ‘deSkew’ plug-in. You can find which folder to install it in GIMP in a similar fashion to above “Edit–> Preferences–> Folders–> Plug-ins.” Note that this is different from the scripts path! For some reason the original host of this plug-in has disappeared, but the files are available in links in the comments of the ‘deSkew’ page of the GIMP Registry.
Windows:precompiled executable available here.
Linux: Download this project by clicking the “Zip” button on the GITHub page. Unzip the folder and read the install instructions from the README file. You have to make the project, but it isn’t complicated. You will need to give the resulting program executable permissions, and then copy it to your /…/gimp-2.0/plug-ins folder.
UPDATE: As of 2023, The links I marked out above do not work. deskew is no longer maintained from what I can tell. I did find this github site with a copy of the plugin.
You can download the archiving scripts I modified from our GitHub Code site. You will need both of the scripts shown on the webpage. If there are multiple version, be sure to get the ones with the latest dates. Simply install these into the “scripts” folder in the gimp installation directory as shown in the video.
This video explains where and how to install all of these files:
Hi. Any chance the deskew can be updated for current version of GIMP? Thanks
I’m sorry I haven’t had time the past few months to even take a look at it. I’ll try to take a look in summer if I get a break then. I have a massive backlog of posts I need to make that I haven’t had time to write up for this blog and am playing catch-up on those projects. Please let me know if you figure out any other solution before then. Good luck!
Hello ,
* I have a folder with 100s of jpg images and I want to split each image in half lengthwise , exactly 50/50 .
It is not practical to outline each image . Can this work using dimensions , like 400×600 split 200×600 , instead .
Else is there any image editor that can do this ?
Thanks From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7199VEUC9Co
I haven’t written this script that way, however I’m sure there’s a plugin or script to do that for Gimp somewhere online.
Hi everyone, I’ve been getting a few requests for the “deskew” plugin which I had hosted in my Google drive, but the link that was shared around is now invalid. Here’s an updated location where you can download the plug-in file: https://madebynathan.com/post-assets/deskew
(I also had a blog post about this plugin: https://madebynathan.com/2010/05/13/scanning-lots-of-photos-at-once/)
Hi everyone,
unfortunately I’m having problems getting deskew to run (downloaded from the madebynathan site above).
All I get:
./deskew: error while loading shared libraries: libgimpui-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I’m running OpenSuSe Tumbleweed, GIMP 2.10 is installed … libgimpui is available in /usr/lib64.
Any thoughts?
It seems like deskew is so outdated that it might be looking in the wrong place for the library. Since I didn’t realize all the links in the article were dead, I added a link to a github of archived unsupported gimp plugins https://github.com/gimp-plugins-justice/gimp-deskew-plugin You can see the code and possibly figure out what is going on with it.