No free image cropping

Still no free image cropping … Ridiculous!

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For the time being, it looks like you’ll need to rely upon your favorite image editor to make precise crops, if the basic horizontal & vertical Fill-Fit options don’t achieve what you’re looking for.

Yes, I know and keep doing so …! Welcome in the 21th century. :wink:
Defenitely won’t buy the Sparkle 3 “update”.

A crop tool is going to prevent you from buying the upgrade?

Ok.

No, but also other missing features:

Text floating in multiple text boxes, custom arrows in image galleries, full height (vh) feature for images, galleries, video, guides and rulers … Designer stuff if you understand what I mean. :slight_smile:

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It’s not just cropping. It’s the general clumsy image placement “features.”

Let me put it this way. You can only position it with text like alignment relative to the box, i.e. left, right, center, top, down alignment. Why couldn’t we just drag the image anywhere we want?

And scaling of image? Why couldn’t you just give me two X and Y scaling sliders? Instead, we must drag the box, and it won’t let me scale beyond the page border! You know, I want to zoom in, 225%, and center it at 365px, 256px, BladeRunner style.

In iWeb, all I had to do was drop my image in there, scale it and drag it to crop to fit my composition, and it generates the image for me in the back when publishing. Tomorrow, I might fancy that the image needs to be shifted a bit to the left by 20 px to hide something that I don’t want to show.

But without such tool in built inside Sparkle, I would have to actually to another tool, say Gimp, scale and crop the image (and pray that the size and proportions are correct, export, and drop in Sparkle.

If I decide I want the width and height proportion needs to be adjusted a bit to fit my other elements on the page, I would have to do the Gimp scaling and dropping again. That’s just flat out clumsy.

Let me put it this other way… if you view Sparkle as a web page composition editor… i.e. text/image/video/… composition, then it fails at this fine points of image composition in a very clumsy way.

I had big plans for redoing my whole website in buying Sparkle 3 Pro. Guess I am scaling it back to just using it as the “blog” section.

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Sparkle is missing and lacking in robustness many design tools, even simple ones.

Sparkle is trying to serve three audiences; non designer (1-2 sites), pro web designer (many sites), and me the content creator (sites as packaging for content). Sparkle 3 is an update aimed at the non designer in my opinion. For the most part the pro web designers and us content creators don’t need features that do things for us, we need workflow tools.

If I can’t have the tools you requested, then I want Sparkle to at least give me a blank canvas and not interrupt my workflow.

Steve Jobs once replied to a question of why certain Apple products lacked certain features, saying Apple will only build something or add a feature that Apple can do better.

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The current recommendation from Duncan and team is to make use of the image cropping capabilities in Pages.

Not being a developer myself, I don’t know how difficult it would be to reverse engineer that capability and build it into Sparkle. It may be that this is on the to-do list and the development team just hasn’t got there yet.

It’s not just on our to-do list, we even implemented image cropping, but it wasn’t good enough. It’s coming.

But if you used Sparkle 2, had a workflow for deal with the lack of this feature, Sparkle 3 doesn’t take away that workflow.

Yes it’s badly missing. We get about 100x emails about being able to create a password protected area. In fact I think we probably got 5 in 6 years about image cropping.

We are listening. Again we will add image cropping, better file management, etc, but a sample of 1 isn’t a statistic.

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Duncan, with regard to your thinking on this future feature, would we be talking about destructive “cropping” of images, or non-destructive “clipping” or “masking”?

Sparkle already errs on the side of having more pixels rather than fewer, to allow for rapid change in composition without having to fetch the source images. This philosophy applied to cropping means non destructive masking.

The question of whether media is too large is separate, and we need to build a dedicated asset manager that can then be used to trim unused pixels.

All these are hypotheticals of course. We could build something entirely different :slight_smile:

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Yes, it is true. This is also missing…

Good to hear masking/cropping is coming, hopefully soon.

Here’s the thing, I will never use Sparkle in professional settings, and very reluctant in using it in private setting too until this cropping/masking of images is implemented. Just this missing feature alone is a disqualifying factor.

If you have ever done UI design professionally, you’d know that there is always those client managers (or even your own managers) who for whatever reasons want you to move this gfx a few pixels here and a few there, align here a few, and there a few. And like in the army, eventually moved it back to the original place. For the life of me, I could never see one iota of difference, but supposedly they could. Having to take the images to another image manipulation tools like GIMP or Photoshop to crop/scale, and then take them back would have driven me up the roof, repeatedly.

This is why this repositioning/scaling/cropping/masking of images is so important – we designers move images on a whim all the time, depending on which side of the bed we roll off that morning, and the amount of caffeine in the bloodstream. Apparently, so do the client managers, and they know it too.

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Build something entirely different. That’s worth the wait.

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I lived that life…brings tears and laughter. I learned early on that lousy managers do that because they can’t do anything else. Every client and every company has at least one.

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Thanks @Hempstead, I can understand that. On the other hand we can talk about feature X missing because of everything else that sparkle does right, if it didn’t it just wouldn’t be worth talking about.

So maybe we can focus on all that sparkle does right?

For the past 6 years we have been delivering improvements and new features, and we’re quite used to “if only this feature existed”. No need to fret, it’s coming soon enough.

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What you describe is what I meant with " free image cropping" … :+1:

Interesting … When I had a look on Sparkle 3 I asked myself “who are they targeting?” Obviously “non-coders”. In their own words they want to target the visual (non and/or pro) designer/content creator/layouter. If that is really the case than it is contradictory that Sparkle lacks in many simple “non-coder design tools”.

This does not mean Sparkle isn’t good Software and you can’t build good looking and functional websites but watching the announcement for Sparkle 3 over the last months and looking at the again not implemented features is hard to understand.

By the way (Sparkle Team): the ones that “criticize” you move you forward, not the ones that praise you for anything. As Steve Jobs said once: If we think we are 100% convinced we should start to review – o.k. today there is a different mindset even at Apple. :wink::slightly_smiling_face:

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Those who agree with me make me feel good…Those who disagree make me better.

Always happy to hear good constructive criticism. But I’ve heard a lot of “this sucks, my pet feature is missing, won’t buy”.

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