Wordpress Plugin: Scissors
Scissors is a plugin for the WordPress blogging system that adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to Wordpress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images. Additionally, images that are resized in the post editor are automatically resampled to the requested size using bilinear filtering when a post is saved, which improves the perceived image quality while reducing the amount of data transferred at the same time.
Scissors was translated into a total of 20 languages by WordPress users and remains popular among users of WordPress versions 2.8 and prior with a download count of more than 80,000 on Jan 1st, 2010. As of version 2.9 of WordPress, image editing functionality based on the Scissors code comes out of the box. I therefore decided to stop maintenance of the plugin, but others picked up where I left off: Anton Huizinga created a version of Scissors that is compatible with WordPress 2.9, which I would like to explicitly recommend to people who enjoy using Scissors’ features that have not yet been integrated into the WP core.
Vielen Dank für das extrem fantastische PlugIn! Ich habe die selben Erfahrungen mit den bereits bestehenden PlugIns gemacht und genau nach etwas wier Scissors gesucht. Vielen Dank!
hi. Thanks for plugin
perfect.
Regards
Thanks for the plugin. I really needed something like this. Sometimes it’s a pain to crack open PhotoShop for a simple image resize.
The plugin is wonderful. Thank you for sharing the excellent work. I can’t wait until you add image rotation. I saw it on your todo list.
Great idea, and would love to use it, but the problem is after activating and going to test it out in the media gallery, I click to add an image and nothing appears. just a blank popup. I’m running Wordpress version 2.5.1
Any help would be great.
Wordpress Plugin - Scissors | WPStart.org - WordPress themes, plugins and news (October 30, 2008, 11:18 pm).
[...] Release page | Download plugin [...]
Hi Stephan.
This is a great and very usable plugin. I`ve been looking for something like this, and will be happy to localize it to Norweegian.
I`d also like to suggest an improvment. Scissors work great as it is but it would be even better if it could integrate with image edit function in WP to make one cropped thumb and a different cropped “original” image.
I believe the correct term for this would be: “Contextual Image Cropping” or “Relevance-Enhanced Image Cropping”
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/crop/
http://drupal.org/node/210217
Keep up the good work
John Myrstad
Until now, I used “Flexible Upload”. Your plugin seems very nice, I think I will try it, but first I would like to know: does it embed watermarks like Flexible Upload?
Danke schön!
WordPress Plugins Releases for 10/30 | BlogBroker24-7 (October 31, 2008, 1:24 am).
[...] Scissors [...]
Yes we need this plugin. It seems hard worked.
Thanks
hey there.
I would like to run this plugin and flexible upload in parallel, as I like the flexible upload feature to autoresize images.
After flexible upload has done its job I’d like to use scissors for finetuning if needed…
An excellent feature would be for example if I could crop a part of the image and save it as the thumbnail, as my gallery looks horrible with the mixed landscape/portrait thumbnails I currently have, i.e. http://pacura.ru/category/pictures/afrika-burns-festival/
oh, sorry forgot to mention that I create my galleries with another uploader, not the built-in one.
an option to browse with your plugin into a certain folder
woudl also be nice 
Hi Stephan, very nice plugin!
thanks a lot
chuss!
Thanks so much for your nice comments and your ideas for improvement! I’ll try to incorporate them in the next version of the plugin to make it even more usable to you.
In particular, I like the idea of being able to crop the image and its thumbnails seperately as you suggest John. Thanks also for your offer to localize the plugin!
Compatibility with the “Flexible Upload” plugin is also something I’ll pay attention to, because I think it’s still very useful with its auto-resize and watermarking functionality.
So, you can expect a new version soon.
Thanks again,
Stephan
Nice plugin indeed!
But it could be much better if you add i8n support to it.
This way the integration of the plugin into WP interface would be 100% perfect.
(If you add i8n support I would contribute doing the spanish (es_ES) translation).
Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugins Releases for 10/30 | PR & Tech (October 31, 2008, 1:06 pm).
[...] Scissors [...]
WordPress Plugins 10/31 (October 31, 2008, 2:38 pm).
[...] October 31, 20085:44 am WordPress Plugins 10/31 Scissors WordPress plugin adds cropping and resizing functionality to Wordpress’ image upload and [...]
Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugins Releases for 10/30 | KaosKoxp Oyun Portali (October 31, 2008, 9:34 pm).
[...] Scissors [...]
WordPress Plugins Releases for 10/30 · Softonix.com (October 31, 2008, 9:34 pm).
[...] Scissors [...]
WordPress Plugins Releases for 10/30 | PATRON DIGITAL.COM (November 1, 2008, 2:41 pm).
[...] Scissors [...]
That is a fantastic plugin.
It was really helpful to play the movie video clip of the plugin in action. That helps to make the decision — clicking on download!
You made this plugin after a few hours of work?! Amazing. I guess that jQuery really does help.
Sincere thanks
Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugins Releases for 10/30 | Aslifm Blogu (November 1, 2008, 9:32 pm).
[...] Scissors [...]
WordPress Plugins Releases for 10/30 | PATRONIT.NET (November 3, 2008, 4:28 pm).
[...] Scissors [...]
“In version 0.9, which was released on October 31st…”
This functionality makes me let you marry my firstborn child
Hi, thanks for a terrific plug in. Just what I needed. I’ve been using it for a week or so now and have only run into one issue. There seems to be a file size limit of some sort. I’m able to crop and re-size images of around 500 pixels on the longest dimension, but when I upload a 3000×2000 file from my D70, I get a blank error message if it try to crop or resize. Is there a setting somewhere that I could change? I am using Firefox 3 and Windows XP.
Again, thank you for a great plug in
I found the plugin not working in all of my wordpress installs. Unfortunately I didn’t have the possibility to test if another plugin was causing this, however, I did notice you don’t use the wp_enqueue_script functionality to add your js files to the admin header, which might cause some unexpected problems. A nice article about implementing that can be found here.
Oops, just noticed the “// TODO: use wp_enqueue_script?”.
Sorry ’bout that
Wordpress UK » Wordpress Plugin: Scissors - Brücken nach Übersee (November 8, 2008, 2:05 pm).
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Thank you for writing this plugin, finally I can put ImageManager to sleep.
I will put a link on the ImageManager page pointing at your plugin in the Wordpress Plugin Directory.
Brilliant plugin — perfect for what I was trying to do.
Minor tweak — in the ‘lock aspect ratio’ fields — make them a little wider so you can ’see’ 16:9′ when you type the 16 in the text field box.
Also, a question: Can the aspect ratio be computed on the fly rather than automatically showing up as 4:3?
Again, very minor nits.
Hey, thanks a lot! Your suggestions already made it into the development version of the plugin, which you can download from the Wordpress site under “other versions”.
ok, I have some questions: what exactly does the checkbox: use automatic relevance-enhanced image reduction do?
I can’t see any effect if I check that.
And why does that checkbox disappear as soon as I select thumbnail, medium or large?
btw. when I select thumbnail even the lock aspect ratio check box disappears, so I can now only make square thumbnails
Please help.
btw. using wp 2.7 betta 3
ok, I think I start to understand what that checkbox does, but can you please explain in more detail? also can I somehow set it to be unchecked by default?
And how can I do 4:3 thumbnails again?
ovidiu:
Automatic relevance-enhanced image reduction automagically crops your images to have a more relevant and usable crop on medium and thumb images, than if you just rescaled. The ? mark links to this site for explanation: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9611.html
As for ratio in thumbs it seems like you found a small bug…
John Myrstad
yes I read that ? link but I wasn’t sure what the “automatic” means
i.e. does it apply to the whole chain?
thx, will wait for the next version so I can crop 4:3 thumbs again
I’ve addressed the thing with custom ratios for thumbnails in the latest development version: If you specify “crop to exact dimensions” in your Wordpress settings, the thumbnail ratio when cropping with Scissors will be fixed to the specified width/height-values. Otherwise you’ll again be able to specify a custom ratio as before.
works fine now, thank you.
what about an option to have the Automatic relevance-enhanced image reduction on/off for new uploads by default?
I mean one day the multi uploader will work again and then it woudl be nice to be able to set a default option for this…
Right now I am uploading one-by-one anyway so I don’t need an option.
one more question: I imported my blog into another isntallation and all thumbs have been croped to 150×150px using Automatic relevance-enhanced image reduction.
Is there a way to re-crop them all again i.e. to max-width of 130px (which I have set up as my default size for thumbs)? with or without the Automatic relevance-enhanced image reduction option?
Right now I would have to crop them all manually to get them back into 4:3 format
oops. sorry for flooding you here with omments, but i.e. I recropped 10 images, respectively the thumbnails, and checked Automatic relevance-enhanced image reduction and now I go back and realize, the thumbs are square again. I thought checking Automatic relevance-enhanced image reduction might not apply to thumbs as that option is not visible when cropping thumbs
Any reason you didn’t include .gif editing functionality?
I added the ‘if post_mime_type’ and ‘imagegif()’ where applicable and seems to be working fine.
ovidu: Currently I have no plans for adding a “batch cropping” feature because I don’t think that it would be used on a regular basis. Also, the idea of this plugin is to provide simple and easy cropping/resizing functionality. For anything else there’s always software like Paint.NET, Paintshop Pro or Photoshop, just to name a few, that can do more advanced things.
Barry: Neat! How the quality of the resulting images? I was afraid that it would suffer too much when you repeatedly load/store a picture. If it’s alright, should I add gif-support to the plugin like you did?
[quote] ….If you specify “crop to exact dimensions” in your Wordpress settings, the thumbnail ratio when cropping with Scissors will be fixed to the specified width/height-values. Otherwise you’ll again be able to specify a custom ratio as before….. [quote]
Neat solution
John Myrstad
I just upgraded to 0.93 because the 0.92 version stopped working as soon as I installed the Flash 10 upgrade. It works fine, but I get one minor bug (using Firefox 3): When I resize an image, the size of the image after resizing is not reflected in the text of the interface window. If the image was 300×250 and I resize it to 200×180, the text will still show 300×250.
However, this is a wonderful plugin. Many thanks!
-Dave
Nice plugin!
It would be nice to be able to specify width/height and also maybe save those values like presets, so they can be used again.
Keep up the good work:)
I’ve tested the .gif functionality and seems to work just fine. As far as losing quality by resizing multiple times, I’d imagine that scissors would most likely be used to ‘correct’ the standard thumbs etc. WordPress crops on upload. Don’t see any issues with re-cropping etc. as long as the original image is retained?
I’m not getting the ‘Lock aspect ratio’ though, I’d expect this to default to the aspect ratio I set for a thumbnail when cropping a thumbnail for instance.
A cool feature would be to be able to set more (custom) image sizes than the standard original/large/medium/thumbnail (yay for wp2.7 adding one) when uploading an image. Very useful for ‘magazine-style’ themes which potentially need more image size variations, but I guess that’s a whole new plugin altogether
Scissors is definitely my favourite plugin, right before PageMash!
Wow, thanks for your kind comments! I’m really happy to see that so many people use Scissors for their blogs. Additionally, your positive comments and feature requests are very motivating, so keep them coming and I’ll see what I can do.
Dave: Thanks for the bug report. I’ll look into it and can hopefully come up with a solution for the next release of the plugin.
Jon: Presets are a nice idea. I don’t know if it’s possible to deliver this feature for cropping in the next release though because it would require me to use the Jcrop API. And in that area I’m currently hitting a wall due to a weird initialization requirement it has. Maybe I’ll be able to replace Jcrop with another jQuery based control. We’ll see …
Barry: Nice! You can expect GIF support in the next version of Scissors so you don’t have to add it manually anymore.
Concerning the aspect ratio thingy: For thumbnails you’ll already get the behavior you described in the latest development version. For larger images, which are proportionally down-scaled and do not have a fixed aspect ratio, it’s sometimes nice to be able to crop an image exactly to 4:3, 16:9 etc.
Additional custom image sizes would indeed be very cool; great idea! I may consider writing a separate plugin for that because it’s not really in the scope of Scissors.
[quote Stephan] …your positive comments and feature requests are very motivating, so keep them coming and I’ll see what I can do… ]
Feature requests/wishes:
1. Crop overlays Lightroom style. See: http://pendery.org/photography/october-2007/lightroom-11-12-crop-overlay-aid-composition.htm http://www.theglobalphotographer.com/the-global-photographer/2007/9/19/lightroom-crop-overlays.html
2. NextGen Gallery integration/support in some way… http://code.google.com/p/nextgen-gallery/issues/detail?id=167
John Myrstad
I ran into all of the problems you did, and then I chose this plugin. The only thing I would add is support for watermarks. So the user could resize the image and add a watermark to the resized image in one step.
can this option: Automatic relevance-enhanced image reduction be checked automatically somehow rather than having to enable it every time I upload a picture?