Any Crop

Work more efficiently and precisely with crops and avoid long-standing Lightroom bugs:

• View photo and crop sizes in pixels, inches, centimeters, and megapixels; see rotation and mirroring.
• Adjust crops precisely while zoomed in Develop.
• Create crop presets and apply them to many photos at once; set the orientation, angle, position and total size; assign keyboard shortcuts.
• Set an exact crop size in pixels, inches or centimeters.
• Copy crops from one photo to another, even if the photos are in different formats.
• Prepare multiple crops for a set of photos all at once.
• Divide contact sheets into individual frames. 
• Set the absolute rotation of many photos at once. 

Any Crop avoids a long-standing Lightroom bug, where crop settings are sometimes copied incorrectly between different image formats and orientations (Adobe doesn’t consider this a bug).

Try it for free for 30 days. Buy a license at a price you name.

Download and Install

Any Crop requires Lightroom 6 / CC 2015 or Lightroom Classic. (The newer cloud-focused Lightroom doesn’t support plugins.)

1. Download anycrop.1.19.zip.
2. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of Any Crop, exit Lightroom, delete the existing anycrop.lrplugin folder, and replace it with the new one extracted from the downloaded .zip. Restart Lightroom and you’re done.
3. If this is a new installation, extract the folder anycrop.lrplugin from the downloaded .zip and move it to a location of your choice.
4. In Lightroom, do File > Plug-in Manager.
5. Click Add, browse and select the anycrop.lrplugin folder, and click Select Folder (Windows) or Add Plug-in (Mac OS).

The free trial is for 30 days—after that, you’ll need to buy a license.

Buy a License

1. Buy a license at a price you think is fair:  
   
   The license includes unlimited upgrades. Make sure you’re satisfied with the free trial before buying.
2. Copy the license key from the confirmation page or confirmation email.
3. Do File > Plugin-Extras > Any Crop > Crop.
4. Click Buy.
5. Paste the key into the License key box and click OK.

Using Any Crop

The menu command File > Plug-in Extras > Any Crop > Crop opens a floating panel that displays information about the current photo and its crop. In the panel, you can define and apply presets and reset the current crop.

You can position the panel anywhere on the screen. Unfortunately, the panel won’t stay on top (a limitation of Lightroom). To keep the panel visible, tuck it under the upper-left corner of the main window, with just the left half of the panel showing:

That will keep the panel visible without sacrificing much screen real estate. If the panel disappears, just do Any Crop > Crop again to bring it to the top.

Units

By default, a crop’s dimensions are shown in pixels. Use the Units drop-down menu to change that to inches or centimeters. Then set the resolution to the same value you’ll use when you print, otherwise the size shown by Any Crop won’t be accurate.

To export the photo at the exact size shown by Any Crop, uncheck the Export setting Resize to Fit and set Resolution to the same value shown in Any Crop.

Presets

Any Crop provides crop presets for all the common aspect ratios, and you can add your own.

To apply a preset, select it from the Preset dropdown menu. If you select Apply to all, the preset will be applied to all the selected photos, not just the current (most-selected) photo.

To define a new preset, select New… from the menu.

By default, the new preset will fit the largest possible crop rectangle of the given ratio inside the target image’s current crop, matching its landscape or portrait orientation. Checking Use the current image’s crop will define the preset to also use the angle, orientation, position, and size of the current image’s crop. You can control which of these are included in the preset by choosing the corresponding options.

Tip: To edit or delete a preset, you first have to select it, which will apply it to the current photo. To avoid modifying the current photo, first deselect all photos by doing Edit > Select None. Then select the desired preset and invoke Edit or Delete from the preset menu.

If you find yourself frequently manually adjusting a crop after applying a preset, in the Edit window check the option Open the Crop tool in Develop after applying.

Copy and Paste Crops

To copy a crop from the current photo to one or more target photos, do File > Plug-in Extras > Any Crop > Copy. Then select the target photos and do Paste. By default this will copy not just the aspect ratio but the angle, relative position, and relative size of the crop. But you can select which of these attributes is copied:

Unlike Lightroom, Any Crop correctly copies the crop settings between photos of different formats, e.g. from a raw to JPEG.

Applying Multiple Crop Presets

Use the Batch command to prepare multiple crops of a set of photos. For example, once you have an edited set, you may wish to prepare crops at 8.5 x 11 for printing, 3 x 4 for iPad, 5 x 8 for Android, and 9 x 16 for HDTV.

Select the photos and do File > Plug-in Extras > Any Crop > Batch. Choose a crop preset, a collection set or publish service, and the name of a collection within that set or service. Any Crop will create the collection if it doesn’t exist, and it will place virtual copies of the selected photos in the collection, cropped by the preset:

Uncheck Place virtual copies in collections to stop Batch from creating the collections.

You can apply up to 15 presets at a time. Then you can review the individual virtual copies and, if necessary, adjust their crops.

Tip: For each of the presets, set the option Same number of pixels as target image’s current crop. This will ensure that if the original image has already been cropped, the crop created by the preset will have the same number of megapixels and will be centered over the original crop. Otherwise, the preset’s crop will be placed inside the original crop, making it smaller than you probably want.

Adjusting Crops while Zoomed in Develop

To precisely adjust a crop while zoomed in Develop, do File > Plug-in Extras > Adjust Crop:

This window is a floating panel—move it outside of the main Lightroom window, and you’ll be able to zoom and pan the photo in Develop without closing the panel. See it in action:

In the Adjust Crop window, click an edge or corner icon and then adjust the Resize slider to move that edge or corner. Change Scale to move in smaller or larger increments. Resize obeys the setting of the Crop tool’s lock, maintaining the aspect ratio if it is locked.

To increase or decrease the size of the crop, maintaining its aspect ratio and center, click the + icon and then adjust the Resize slider.

To move the center of the crop, click an edge or corner icon, and then adjust the Shift slider.

Move the Angle slider to adjust the crop angle.

Normally, Adjust Crop displays changes to the crop immediately as you move its sliders. But if the option Preferences > Performance > Use Graphics Processor is set to Off (perhaps because you have an older computer), updates to the crop won’t be displayed until you stop moving the sliders.

To work around this Lightroom limitation, set the option File > Plug-in Manager > Any Crop > Settings > Use Adjust Crop when the graphics processor (GPU) is disabled. Note, however, that the History panel will fill up with very many extra steps as you adjust the crop.

Dividing Contact Sheets into Frames

The Divide Contact Sheet command divides a contact sheet into individual frames, one virtual copy or JPEG per frame, stacked with the sheet.

To divide a sheet, rotate it to level its strips and crop it to the edges of the strips. The Crop tool’s Auto often does a very good job of leveling the strips, but if they are skewed, try the Transform > Guided tool.

Then invoke File > Plug-in Extras > Divide Contact Sheet. (You can divide more than one sheet at a time.) The command provides step-by-step instructions for handling the gaps between strips, extra margin around frames, the number of rows and columns, previewing the cropped frames, setting the copy names of the virtual copies and the JPEGs, and setting a metadata field with the sheet and frame number.

The first video shows how to include the spaces between frames, the second how to exclude the spaces:

Measuring the gaps between strips and frames: If you want the cropped frames to include the horizontal and vertical spaces between frames, set Horizontal gap and Vertical gap to 0%. Otherwise, you’ll have to take a couple minutes to measure these gaps. But you’ll only need to redo the measurements if you change to a different negative storage page with different spacing.

1. Rotate and crop the contact sheet to the edges of the frames, straightening the sheet with the Crop tool’s Auto or Transform > Guided if necessary.
2. Create a virtual copy of the sheet and make a small crop of the vertical gap between two frames, using the Adjust Crop command to get a precise crop.
3. Repeat step 2 two more times with different vertical gaps.
4. Create a virtual copy of the sheet and make a crop of the horizontal gap between two strips of frames, again using Adjust Crop.
5. Repeat step 4 two more times with different horizontal gaps.
6. Select the contact sheet and all 6 of the cropped gaps, do File > Plug-in Extras > Divide Contact Sheet, click on the Measure Gaps tab, then click Measure.

Setting Rotation of Photos

The Set Rotation command sets the absolute rotation of many photos at once (a function inexplicably absent from Lightroom):    

Keyboard Shortcuts

To assign a keyboard shortcut to a preset, edit the preset and in the Menu shortcut dropdown at the bottom of the Edit window, select one of the menu commands Preset 1 through Preset 5. This lets you invoke the preset using File > Plug-in Extras > Any Crop > Preset i. Next, assign a keyboard shortcut to the menu command Preset i.

Windows: You can use the standard menu keystrokes to invoke the Crop or Preset i commands. For example, to invoke Crop: ALT+F opens the File menu, U selects the Plug-in Extras submenu, Enter/Return opens the submenu, and C invokes Crop. To invoke Preset 1: ALT+F, U, Enter/Return, 1.

To reassign a different final keystroke to an Any Crop menu item, edit the file Info.lua in the plugin folder. Move the & in front of the desired letter in the menu command’s name, changing the name itself if necessary.

To assign a single keystroke as the shortcut, download and install the free, widely used AutoHotkey. Then in File Explorer navigate to the plugin folder anycrop.lrplugin. Double-click Install-Keyboard-Shortcut.bat and restart your computer. This defines the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+C to invoke Crop and Ctrl+Alt+1 to invoke Preset 1. To change the shortcuts, edit the file Keyboard-Shortcut.ahk in Notepad and follow the instructions in that file.

Mac OS: You can use the standard mechanism for assigning application shortcuts to plugin menu commands. In System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, click + to add a new shortcut. In Application select Adobe Lightroom Classic CC. In Menu Title type “Crop” or “Preset 1” preceded by three spaces: “<space><space><space>Crop” or “<space><space><space>Preset 1”  (omit the quotes, case matters). In Keyboard Shortcut type the desired key or key combination.

Support

Please send problems, bugs, suggestions, and feedback to ellis-lightroom@johnrellis.com.

I’ll gladly provide free licenses in exchange for reports of new, reproducible bugs.

Known limitations and issues:

• If the crop doesn’t change immediately as you change the Move and Angle sliders in the Adjust Crop panel, Lightroom’s use of the graphics processor (GPU) may be disabled. See here for a workaround.
• In Lightroom 8.1 and later, if you apply an Any Crop preset in Develop and then resize the crop with the aspect ratio locked (the lock icon in the Crop Tool panel closed), the aspect ratio will reset to Original. To work around this Lightroom bug, apply the preset in Library rather than Develop. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to automate this workaround reliably in Any Crop, so we must wait for Adobe to fix the bug. Please visit the bug report, add your opinion, and click Me Too and Follow in the upper-right corner.
• Any Crop requires Lightroom 6 / CC 2015 or Lightroom Classic—it relies on features missing from earlier versions. 

Version History