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.
Stephan,
Dont mean to hog your blog, but is there any chance you could repackage ’scissors’ as a straightforward PHP class to be used on any PHP site ?
Regards,
mmuller
That’d be a good idea, but as I do not have the time for such a repackaging and no use for such a class myself I’m relying on the open source community to work on that.
WordPressに入れておきたいPlugin（プラグイン）とその理由 | CHALLENGE MIND (October 4, 2009, 9:27 am).
[...] Scissors [...]
WordPressにまずは入れておきたいプラグイン | CHALLENGE MIND (October 10, 2009, 2:45 pm).
[...] Scissors [...]
When I use Scissors to watermark an image not only do I get my graphic watermark but there is a tiny text of my site url overlaid on the graphic as well. Can I turn that off somehow?
Kermit, adding text like that is certainly not a feature of the plugin. Are you sure that the text doesn’t stem from the watermark image?
What a super fantastic, Wordpress image editing plugin! Just what the doctor ordered. Saves loads of time. Thanks for sharing and keep up the great work!!
You were right. Somehow it watermarked the watermark. I just ftp’ed the original image back up and all is fine. Thanks!
Late last summer, I installed the Scissors Plugin on a WordPress based web site (www.gsacsports.org) and loved the results. However, when I tried to install the plug in on another site (www.westmont.edu/athletics), it simply did not work. The media pop-up page that you get when trying to insert and image into a post, looks exactly the same whether Scissors is active or inactive. Are there known incompatibilities with other plugins? I’m using WordPress 2.8.5
Ron, please install the new version 1.3.1. Instead of suppressing the Scissors controls, it will display an error message. I’m quite sure that it’s the GD library that is not available on your server.
Hi I love your plugin because my co-bloggers have not the slightest clue of photo editing but a few weeks ago it suddenly stoped working. Wp and scissors are at the newest version. Do you have an Idea what might be the problem?
Camilla had the same Problem:
“This plug-in looks to be exactly what I need, but I can’t get it to work. The plug-in shows up and everything, but no matter what I try – resizing, rotating, cropping – the image doesn’t change one bit. After setting the new size, I click “resize” and the bar changes to look as though it’s working, but nothing happens. Any ideas why?”
The animated bar rotates forever.
Please try to find the last working version from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scissors/download/. That should help us locate any potential error introduced recently.
Thanks, Stephan
Watermarking doesn’t seem to work. Can watermark files have a transparency background? What’s the max height and width limit of the watermark file?
Does this plugin support multiple watermarks? For isn’t if I wanted to watermark “For Sale” and a water mark “Sold”, can I select between either one to use withou having to change the settings?
Ok, watermarking works for me, even with transparency. I must have not understood the way to apply it.
But 1 question remains – If I wanted more than one watermark, how do I go about this?
Hey Stephan, thanks so much for this great plugin. It does 99% of what I needed and its very easy to use.
My problem: I want medium images to ALWAYS use 630×250 aspect ratio. They try to use the ratio of the uploaded image, and that’s not what I want, I need it to always by the 630×250 ratio.
How I solved it: I edited scissors.php and changed the two lines that set the aspect ratio. The original lines are remarked below.
$cropAspect = “:”;
$cropAspect .= “”;
//$cropAspect = “:”;
//$cropAspect .= “”;
This does what I want. Since thumbnails do not use the aspect ratio based on my Media Settings, and medium size is the only size I need to control this on, hardcoding the aspect ratio globally like this works for me.
What I’d prefer: I wish that the Media Settings I set for Medium (630×250) would show up in the aspect ratio box by default. I assumed it would work this way.
Question: Is this the intended behaviour? Isn’t setting the dimensions 630×250 in Media Settings supposed to tell the cropper to use this as the ratio?
Looks like this comment box doesnt put line breaks in properly, all my text is running together. :/
Thanks! If I understand you correctly, what you want is to specify a default aspect ratio for the cropping tool, right? Upgrade to the most recent version of the plugin and you can do that on the WordPress media settings page, as you can see on this screenshot.
Hope that fills in the missing 1%.
WordPress plugins I use and how one made my blog faster | Geekality (November 3, 2009, 7:17 pm).
[...] Scissors lets me for example crop, resize and rotate images when I add them to posts. [...]
Hi Stephan, great plugin (I can’t imagine a situation where i wouldnt want to use it!)
I am having an issue on one site where contributors cannot resize/crop images when they upload them for their posts. It seems like permissions, but havent the foggiest where to start looking. I am using rolescoper to allow contributors to edit any pages, but resize/crop fails on posts, pages or straight upload in the media library for contributors. any help is appreciated.
gamma agency » Blog Archive » Liste des Plugins (extensions) (November 3, 2009, 9:49 pm).
[...] Version 1.2.3 | Par Stephan Reiter | Aller sur le site de l’extension [...]
Many thanks!!!!
Will, thanks for your kind words! I’ll look into this issue this weekend …
Very nice pug in, best of its kind. Clean, fast and professional. Thank you very much.
Hi Stephen, thanks for the reply. I want to thank you for being willing to discuss this. I already had the most recent update. I see the option but that doesn’t solve the issue. What it needs is another radio button that says “Crop using specified image size as the ratio”
I hope that explanation makes clear what I’m going for. Basically I have a featured image on my home page that is always 630×250, therefore I cannot use the ratio of the uploaded image, and I can’t use the “Lock aspect ratio to” radio button because I use the original image’s ratio for other image sizes I’m cropping. Its just this one 630×250 that I want EXACTLY 630×250.
Scenario:
1) Under Image Sizes I set my Medium to 60×40.
2) I upload an image which is originally 100×100.
3) When I choose to crop the Medium size, I don’t want a marquee that is using 100×100 as its ratio, I want one that uses 60×40 for the ratio.
The hardcode edit I made to your code overrides any preset ratio and allows me to force 630×250 in the radio box below the crop tool. Everything works beautifully this way, its just I can only do this for one image size, and I have to make the change every time I upgrade your plugin
Top 1000 WordPress Plugin Authors « Metode de promovare (November 6, 2009, 7:39 pm).
[...] Scissors [...]
Will, it seems that this is a problem related to Role Scoper, so I’d like to ask you to discuss this with the plugin author.
In standard WordPress, contributors aren’t allowed to upload and edit images, as can be read here; so Scissors doesn’t allow image manipulation, too. Authors, editors and administrators, on the other hand, are allowed to resize/crop/… images with Scissors. I tried this, it works as expected.
@strantheman: check out the latest version of the plugin (1.3.3). It should make you happy; at least, I hope it will!
hi, i have been trying out the watermarking feature of scissors and have come across a problem that i don’t know how to fix:
upon trying my first watermark, i didn’t like how it looked. so i changed the image. the original image chosen for the watermark was watermarked on the second image.
i deleted the original image in the media library, but it is still there. i also removed the watermark, then added it back, it is still there. i deactivated the plugin, then reactivated it, it is still there. i deactived & uninstalled the plugin then reinstalled & reactivated the plugin and it is still there. how do i remove the previous image selections used for watermarking in the watermarking plugin? they do not remove themselves it seems when a new image is selected for watermarking.
Something weird happened for me. The plugin has always worked fine and you can see it in action here (http://is.gd/4R5KD), but then all of a sudden with no changes to the site, plugin, or wordpress, it stopped working and started to come out weird.. like this (http://is.gd/4R5Nh).
I tried updating the plugin and i tried removing the image and replacing it with a completely different one and nothing seemed to work.
A friend of mine said the same thing started happening to him as well.
Any ideas?
Watermarks are baked into the image, that’s the whole idea of watermarking. But, you can easily remove watermarks from an image by opening it in the media library, then clicking the “watermark” button in the Scissors menu and removing the per-size checkboxes that appear …
Hmm, that’s strange and looks like an image loading or image blending problem. Are you two by any chance hosted on the same server? Maybe someone changed the configuration of the GD library that’s used for image processing by Scissors. Since you have already tried other images as watermarks, I don’t really know what else could be the cause of this problem.
Your Scissors plugin is wonderful! I just resized all of our photos in about 5 minutes. Enclosed please find some virtual kitty treats for Bruno (loved your video, too!)…
hi, i’ve tested your plugin, but i’ve some problem with the watermark… i’ve uploaded the watermark image, but when I upload a picture or when I apply the watermark to an image already uploaded is not applied the watermark, how can I solve? thanks for your reply and thanks for this fantastic plugin!
stephan, as stated above, i initially tried removing the watermark (which was and still is successfully removed from the image) but when i go to add it back, the watermarked image is a fractal of all version of watermark images embedded in each other even though i have deleted the other two. i only want to use one. here is what i am talking about: http://blog.diffidentia.net/?attachment_id=218 there is a watermark within a watermark within a watermark. i just want a watermark. how do i get rid of the other two?
where is the watermark image stored?
maybe i can have my administrator manually delete it from the server to force a reset of the watermark image.
You are making this sound more complicated than it is: The watermark image is the image you select on the media settings page. When you upload new images, the watermark is added to them. If you then use such an image as the new watermark, you’ll get some sort of a recursive effect because the previous watermark was blended into the current one.
So: To avoid this mess, skip watermarking when you upload your new watermark image. Or, alternatively, remove watermarks manually from the watermark image.
Yuck, that sentence is recursive in itself, isn’t it?
Hey Stephan
I see you’re getting bombarded with requests. I would enjoy discussing this with you further, so I hope you continue to be open to communication.
I upgraded to the new version, but I’m not sure what changes you made. I saw the mention in your Changelog, but I don’t know what options to set or unset to get the desired functionality I was suggesting.
See, I expected that since I put 630×250 in for Medium images, that when I when to crop a medium one that the aspect ratio would have been defaulted to 630×250. I hope that we are not having a miscommunication.
nic
Oh! I just had to go back to Settings > Media and set “Default aspect ratio” to “Default aspect ratio Maintain original aspect ratio.”
Just like I expected when I first downloaded it. This is great!
For everyone else, Stephan’s most recent update means that when you choose “Maintain original aspect ratio” the cropper will give you a marque using the same dimensions you have specified for each of your image sizes.
Here’s a screen shot of my Media settings:
http://www.strantheman.com/transfer/wordpress/scissors_media-settings.jpg
Now, when I add an image to a post, and I choose Thumbnail, the marque is defaulted to 190×100 ratio sizing, and Medium is defaulted to 630×250.
Thanks Stephen!
Stephan, that cleared things up. It’s fixed now thanks.
Is there a way to apply the watermark / or other scissors features to multiple media files at the same time? (batch edit)
Hello Stephan!
What to do if I get this message?
“Failed to load image. Image type image/jpeg not supported.”
Im getting this message when im trying to upload image to the library.
// Bootstrap..
No need.. Enabled GD for PHP and now it works.
Hi;
What a wonderful plugin – thank you.
When you perform Crop operation, the actual image is cropped.
Would it be possible to have a ‘Copy’ or ‘Clone’ command in the plugin to keep the original version of the Image before cropping occurs?
Regards
Carl
Hi Again, Stephen.
Ready for another one?
How about meta data? I notice that Wordpress’s resizing functions are stripping out the meta data I have in my images. It may be more accurate to say that Wordpress is simply not grabbing and saving the meta data when it creates the new images from my original.
I realize your app uses some of Wordpress’s functions, so there may be some things you don’t have control over, but if there’s anyway your cropper tools could preserve meta data, I’m sure that your software would garner even more acclaim and support.
thanks again, I love this plugin
Great plug-in. Thanks for it.
博主·你的博客不错啊！支持啊！
The plugin is almost perfect.
There’s one issue. If I want to post more than one image at the post I insert the first one and when I click the media icon to open the gallery and select another one it inserts automactly the first picture.
Is there any workaround this?
One more thing: it’s not generating any thumbnail =/
What to do if I get this message?
“Failed to load image. Image type image/jpeg not supported.”
Im getting this message when im trying to upload image to the library.
(I don’t know how to “enable GD in php”) as was suggested as the fix.
Plug-in list in wordpress | eLKei.NET (December 5, 2009, 9:05 pm).
[...] 17. Scissors “Scissors enhances WordPress’ handling of images by introducing cropping, resizing, rotating, and watermarking functionality.” 이미지를 업로드 할 때 몇가지 수정을 돕는 플러그인입니다. 스크린샷 등을 포스트에 붙일때 많은 도움이 되고있죠. 이 프로그램의 도움을 받아 스크린샷을 수정한뒤 올리는 것이 아니라 올린 다음 수정을 하고 있습니다. Stephan Reiter | Visit plugin site [...]
how exactly do you watermark images that are already uploaded?