Wordpress Plugin: Scissors

303Stephan • 27th Oct 2008 • Portfolio

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.

Screencast

http://www.vimeo.com/7363026

303 Comments Comments Feed

  1. Li-An (March 8, 2009, 11:45 am).

    Right click and save to french translation of 0.97 version here:
    http://www.li-an.fr/blog/wp-content/traduc-lang/scissors-fr_FR.mo
    http://www.li-an.fr/blog/wp-content/traduc-lang/scissors-fr_FR.po

  2. Dave (March 10, 2009, 4:28 pm).

    I’m getting the following error when trying to activate the plugin:

    Parse error: parse error in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\regis\wp-content\plugins\scissors\scissors.php on line 1266

    Any ideas?

  3. Stephan (March 10, 2009, 6:07 pm).

    I’ve just fixed this problem in the new development version of the plugin. It was caused by the use of the short tag

    Thanks for reporting the problem, Dave!

  4. Michael (March 24, 2009, 5:41 pm).

    Hi!

    Could you please tell me how to add my pictures watermark? :) I cant find instruction how to do that.

    And there you say “Watermarking can also be configured and enabled in WordPress’ media settings” but i cant see this settings.

  5. Michael (March 24, 2009, 5:54 pm).

    and yes i am activate plugin =)

  6. Ray (March 26, 2009, 7:15 pm).

    Just downloaded this plugin and love it… much better than WP-Post-Thumbnail.

    One question, let’s say I wanted to use the thumbnail generated from Scissors in a custom field.

    Is there an easy way to get the thumbnail URL from the Media Library?

  7. Stephan (March 26, 2009, 7:22 pm).

    Michael: Just as it says in the readme-file – go to Settings -> Media …

    Ray: Thanks! :-) An easy way to get the thumbnail URL for an image with FireFox is to go the Media Library, right-click on the thumbnail for the image in question and “Copy graphics address” or whatever it is called in English (I’m using the German version of FF).

  8. Patrick (March 31, 2009, 9:36 pm).

    Working with Wordpress MU 2.7 and the plugin does not seem to be saving the crop or the resize. Any known issues there?

  9. Dan (April 4, 2009, 7:23 pm).

    First off, great plugin, I have been using for a few weeks and have been happy with it. I do, however, have a couple of requests.

    I run a real estate site that allows agents to upload lots of pictures and I need a little more control over the formatting. I have the agents upload their pictures straight off of their camera (most of these agents have no idea how to edit images so I have to work around it as best I can). I currently have scissors resize these using a width constraint of 1920 (for full images to get HD quality for display on high end monitors), I would like to be able to crop the full images to 1920×1200, then have scissors resize down the chain. (this is not as important as the next request)

    I currently get images that are 1920×1280 which is okay but not exactly what I want. The real problem is when the agents have portrait pictures. Since I’m only constraining in width, these images are HUGE still 1920×2880. What I want is to constrain portrait images to 1200 high and let the width float. (if I use the 1200 height constraint – it affects my landscape pictures – drops them to 1800×1200 which I don’t want)

    So what I’m really asking for is the ability to detect a portrait image and then resize it to a reasonable height while not interfering with the landscape uploads.

    Thanks again for all the work you have put into this great plugin.

    Dan

  10. Stephan (April 4, 2009, 8:51 pm).

    Dan, thanks for your message! What you’re proposing makes a lot of sense and should be useful for a lot of other people, too. I’ll look into it and hope that I’ll be able to release a version of scissors with support for this portrait/landscape detection next week.

  11. Stephan (April 4, 2009, 8:52 pm).

    Patrick: MU is not supported, I’m not using it. Maybe you can find an MU-user with PHP development background to look at it.

  12. Dan (April 5, 2009, 7:12 am).

    Stephan,

    That’s great, I thought of one more thing that you could work on possibly :)

    It would be great to have the ability to rename the pictures as they come in. The camera naming schemes are not the greatest. I would love to be able to rename them using the MLS number, this is a unique number assigned to every house that is listed for sale.

    I would envision it to be a base name that we can put in as an option then scissors would just add a numerical on the end. so first one in would be 28187222-01, then 28187222-02, etc.

    Dan

  13. Crop,Resize and Watermark Images In Wordpress On The Fly | TECH YARD (April 6, 2009, 8:41 am).

    [...] Download Scissors  |  Scissors WP Plugin HomePage [...]

  14. 2 super Tipps zum Fotoschutz - Bilder schützen (April 6, 2009, 10:31 am).

    [...] neue Fotos, die Du hochlädst irgendwie zu mühsam. Stephan Reiters WordPress Plugin Scissors bietet nicht nur die Möglichkeit die Fotos und Bilder nach dem Hochladen noch zuzuschneiden – [...]

  15. John Myrstad (April 7, 2009, 12:05 am).

    Seems like 2.8 will use the Jcrop image cropping plugin for cropping not scriptalicious like 2.7…

    Would be nice to have scissors included in core…

    John Myrstad.

  17. Steve (April 9, 2009, 12:37 pm).

    For some reason scissors is no longer working as a plugin on my site. Its activated, but wordpress does not acknowledge its existence! Anyone know of any incompatabilities?

  18. Ricky (April 11, 2009, 7:56 pm).

    This is a great plugin and now with watermak support it make it even better, unfortunately if you are in wp 2.6 you will never find the water mark setting menu as the wp_settings_fields function used to insert the settings options only works in 2.7, as far as I know.

    Any idea how can I include the watermark option as a normal settings menu using add_submenu_page?

    Thanks

  19. Lee (April 14, 2009, 12:03 am).

    I apologize if this has been answered before. I am writing a small that builds on MM Forms to mange registration information for an arts festival I work with. Is there a way that I can call scissors into my plugin so that on a custom page I can allow image upload along with your cropping and resizing?

    Thank you for you work and your time.

  20. Edwin (April 16, 2009, 9:52 pm).

    I’m trying this plugin, but so far couldn’t find any settings for it in 2.7.1. Does it work with that version of WP?

  21. Stephan (April 17, 2009, 7:47 am).

    Steve, what’s the WP-version you’re using? Have you already tried to de- and reactive the plugin, or maybe install from scratch?

    Ricky, I’ll look into it and probably just give Scissors its very own options page.

    Lee, the usage scenario you are suggesting is currently not supported. However, feel free to use any Scissors code you need for your work. If you need specific functions, propose a Scissors API and I’ll see what I can do.

    Edwin, Scissors works with WP 2.7.1, which is also the version I am using on my blog. The scissors settings extend WordPress’ very own media settings, so you should look for them in Settings -> Media.

    Thanks for your patience! I’m still without internet access at my new home, but my future ISP already informed me that someone would setup my connection at the end of April. :)

  22. Fred (April 17, 2009, 9:52 am).

    Great plugin. I was able to hack it to solve a problem for several of my websites, but this is something that might be useful in the official release.

    My authors upload images from youth sporting events that are 3000×2000px and 600-700K, but obviously they are not the dimensions or download size that should be included on a web page. Since we want to display the image using Lightbox we end up sending a 600-700K file to each visitor, and there could be as many as 10 photos in a post. Obviously this not an acceptable situation.

    Thanks to Scissors I can resize the Full size image to 720×480 maximum so they display well in Lightbox. I also turn the quality down to a lower value (30) so each image sent to their browser is much smaller, ranging from 30 to 70K.

    However, my visitors would like to be able to download the original full-sized image suitable for printing on photographic paper, because they all want a photo of their child/grandchild scoring a goal or a home run.

    My solution was to add one line to scissors.php after 138 that saves the Full size image as an additional image inserting the word “-original” before the extension, so “goal.jpg” becomes “goal-original.jpg”. This way we can add a link below each photo — “Download original photo” — for the people who want one.

    This solution does not break WordPress or any plugins because you still find the Full size image (adjusted to my website-compatible dimensions) located at “goal.jpg”, as well as the thumbnail and/or medium size photos; you just have an extra image that is the original photo for the people who need it.

  23. How and Why I run WPStart.org | WPStart.org - WordPress themes, plugins and news (April 26, 2009, 5:06 pm).

    [...] Scissors Scissors enhances WordPress’ handling of images by introducing cropping, resizing, and watermarking functionality. It does so blending in nicely with the existing image upload and management dialogs [...]

  24. Stephan (May 1, 2009, 1:51 pm).

    Version 1.0 is out! :-)

    A few features are still missing and will be added in future releases of the plugin, like the landscape/portrait format detection Dan wanted to see. I didn’t forget about them, but I’m still trying to come up with a way to integrated them nicely with WordPress. So, stay tuned …

  25. ウチノコ - ボクのガーベジコレクション (May 2, 2009, 4:41 pm).

    [...] Scissors っていうプラグインを使用。 Ajax を使ったもので、WordPress [...]

  26. Casimir (May 4, 2009, 11:12 am).

    He Stephan,

    I would love a portrait thumbnail selection tool. Most template layout are worked around landscape layout, now shadowbox etc work perfectly (scaling) with portrait or landscape. Only i want to chose where wordpress crops my portrait images…

    I have to upload 300+ fashion images and it keeps cutting of all the heads of the models :)

  27. Eddie (May 7, 2009, 5:09 pm).

    Hello,

    First of all I wanted to thank you very much for sharing such a wonderful . I think it’s excellent.

    I was wondering if it is possible to have multiple instances of the Cropping module or plugin on the edit page. I was wondering this because I have a plugin called “Unique Header Image”. The name is self explanatory but basically I like to separate the article’s or page’s image from the actual content and this way I force the article’s image to go on the top.

    Anyway… I am looking for at least a lead as to how I can integrate Scissors to handle another Image input like the one create by Unique Header Image.
    :)

    Thanks!

  28. Zak Wolfinger (May 8, 2009, 9:41 pm).

    Thanks for an amazing plug-in! I have a small problem. I tried changing the file for the watermark by uploading a new one with a different name and now I get BOTH the old one and the new one. How do I remove the old watermark?

  29. Zak Wolfinger (May 8, 2009, 9:46 pm).

    Please disregard my previous comment. I see what happened. when I uploaded the new watermark file I didn’t notice that Scissors had watermarked the new image with the previous one. Now I understand what happened and how to fix it.

  30. Stephan (May 9, 2009, 11:36 am).

    Thanks for the kind words! I’m glad you find the plugin useful and I’ll try to add the features requested by you in the versions to come, as long as the make sense for a broader audience.

    Eddie, look at the code where Scissors integrates itself into the image information dialog. You should be able to copy that PHP-extended HTML code more or less without changes to integrate another Scissors dialog into a page of your choosing. Just make sure to supply the ID of the image you wish to support editing of.

    Have a nice weekend!

  31. satranç oyunu (May 9, 2009, 9:42 pm).

    Thanks for plugin.I love wordpress

  32. Vahe (May 10, 2009, 1:17 am).

    awesome plugin, thank you!!!

  33. Eddie (May 11, 2009, 6:23 pm).

    Stephan, thank you very much for your help! I’ll try to make sense out of it :)

  34. Dan (May 17, 2009, 5:55 pm).

    Stephan,

    Anything new in 1.0.2? can’t find a changelog anywhere. Still keeping my eyes out for the portrait/landscape addition.

    Thanks

    Dan

  35. Stephan (May 19, 2009, 12:08 pm).

    Hey Dan,

    1.0.2 was a maintenance release and didn’t contain any new features visible to the user. Samuel cleaned up the code and Sergey contributed Russian language files. 1.0.3 will contain Greek language files (already part of the development version).

    I just wished there was a better way of delivering language file updates … Hmmm, is there a plugin for that? ;-)

    Stephan

  36. Richard (May 19, 2009, 3:56 pm).

    Hi!

    great plugin. I have just one request: changelog!!! :)

    It’d be great if you put a changelog, either here or on the wordpress extension page (in the Other Notes section) for Scissors. A nice example of what you could do is here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/other_notes/

    Thanks!

  37. adex (May 19, 2009, 8:41 pm).

    Great plugin, but no changelog :(

  38. dodo (May 21, 2009, 3:43 pm).

    hi stephanreiter

    your plugin nearly perfect !!!

    but,if use small thumbnails on the pages,then show the same watermark on thumbnails and big images, that’s unreasonable.

    i’m wating for you updata…..

    now i had no choice but to disable the watermark .

    expecteding…..

    *** can the plugin set the image quality in the next version ? that will be super flexible for the users >_<

    thankyou , you creat a great plugin!!!!

  39. Ovidiu (May 27, 2009, 7:15 am).

    I am testing out wordpress 2.8 beta 2 and although the settings are set to max 1600×1024 for full size image, the uploaded pictures do not get automatically cropped :-(

    manually resizing after uploading works though.

  40. Stephan (May 27, 2009, 4:58 pm).

    I just installed WP 2.8 beta 2 locally to investigate this. Unfortunately I’m not able to reproduce your problem. Auto-resize works just fine for me (note: this is not cropping, it’s resizing) … Could you post a screenshot of your media settings? Maybe there’s something different between your and my configuration.

    Thanks,
    Stephan

  41. Stephan (May 27, 2009, 5:54 pm).

    Changelog who? Version 1.1 is out! :)

  42. Richard (May 27, 2009, 6:43 pm).

    Hey, great, thanks for the changelog!! :)

  43. tx8 (May 27, 2009, 6:50 pm).

    Just want to thank you for this great plugin, version 1.1 is fantastic, all I needed ! Keep up the good work.

  44. tx8 (May 27, 2009, 9:20 pm).

    *just missing overlays (thickbox, lightbox, greybox…) ;)

  45. Dan (May 28, 2009, 5:58 am).

    Great job on the 1.1 update, for those of you who want the ability to control the automatic resizing of both portrait an landscape pictures then this is the update you have been waiting for.

    It will detect the aspect ratio and resize accordingly.

    Thanks Stephan for the great update

    Dan

  46. Stephan (May 28, 2009, 5:58 am).

    tx8, here’s some information about overlays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDnXkFVEQ0Y Hope it’s useful!

  47. Piksal» Blog Archive » How to use Wordpress for a portfolio website (May 29, 2009, 1:07 pm).

    [...] 2. Scissors [...]

  48. Mister Peabody (June 12, 2009, 6:16 pm).

    Could you please explain, perhaps provide a real-world example for, the use for “Adaptive mode: Limit width of landscape images and height of portrait images” for the three non-thumbnail images sizes? THANKS!

  49. face book (June 14, 2009, 10:22 am).

    thanks for you.a+

  50. Jörn (June 14, 2009, 12:13 pm).

    Hallo,
    danke für das super plugin! Ich habe ein kleines Problem:
    ich habe eine weitere bildgröße, wie hier http://wordpress.org/support/topic/235286 beschrieben, hinzugefügt, bei mir heißen die »mini_thumbs«…
    Wenn ich nun die »normalen« thumbnails croppe, sollen die kleinen den gleichen ausschnitt bekommen…
    Gibt es da einen hook, den ich irgendwie verwenden könnte?

    Danke,
    Jörn

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