P: Crop to specific pixel dimensions

There is a Lightroom plugin called Mogrify you might want to look into.

You might ask yourself why I'm doing it this way, instead of using After Effects to create the timelapse and punch in. There's a reason. My client wants a date and timecode stamp, and the best way that I've figured out to do that is to:
1)import and process in lightroom
2)export the frames
3)run the frames through EasyBatchPhoto to timestamp each file
4)assemble the timestamped frames in AE.

Yes I'm beating my head against the wall. I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to accomplish the timecode stamp in an adobe product... the exif data should exist with the frames in AE, Lightroom sure has it, but I haven't found a way to place it on a frame and have control over the location of the timestamp.

I'm a bit late to the discussion, but holy crap I could use this feature. Let's say I shoot a time-lapse on a camera that takes a 5760 x 3840 image. I want to punch in on a 1920 x 1080 pixel section of my frame and then I want to sync that crop with 1000 images. Sure Lightroom lets me use a 16x9 aspect ratio, but I don't want to go past 1:1.

I have found a way to crop without resizing to a specific pixel dimension. It does require to create a blank image using another program, to cajole LightRoom into making the crop the size you want! I've posted a video showing how to do it on YouTube. Am I seriously the first person in the world to do this??? That would be nuts... Anyway, check out the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wsoS...

The ability to define develop enhancements (e.g. crop) to be applied at export time (and NOT written back to catalog) is also desirable, but is not the subject of this thread..

Plugins need to be able to write crop settings to catalog, just like they can for almost all other develop settings.

I mean, if Lightroom supported exact cropping, both aspect ratio and dimensions, then there would be scant need for the XmpCrop plugin (which is a surprisingly popular plugin - a testament to the need for precise cropping in Lightroom).

Having writable cropping available to plugins would still be worthwhile, not anymore for basic cropping support, but for things like auto-import/auto-crop/auto-export, which is another thing a surprising number of Lr users want to do. It would also be good for things like restoring saved develop settings, and lots of other things ..........

Fingers crossed for Adobe to fill this hole in Lr6..

I don't write LR plug-ins, and you do, so I'm asking: if the Develop Crop properties were writable in the plug-in, would changing them replicate those changes to the database, or just temporarily in an in-memory object that doesn't not replicate changes back to the database?

In other words, I can imagine that because Export doesn't change crop dimensions, an Export plug-in also wouldn't be able to change them, because that would effectively make it a Develop plug-in, at least If changes to those are updated into the database.

Crop numbers are already available to plugin read-only, they need to be writable.

It seems like two changes would be necessary:

1) Allow larger crop numbers to be entered so you could enter the pixel dimensions as the crop ratio and not worry about determining a greatest common factor to divide both by if there is one.

2) Resize Exactly option rather than the Fit that always happens now so the off-by-one errors wouldn't occur due to rounding.

Those two would be enough if someone was careful to replicate the crop-ratio numbers into the Export Dimension numbers, but a third change, which is more as a convenience, would be:

3) Use Crop numbers as Pixel Dimensions as a specification in the Export panel.

This 3rd option could imply the 2nd but sometimes you might want 2) as a separate option that has nothing to do with using the crop numbers, just using exact numbers not tied to the aspect ratio. This would allow anamorphic resizing, too, so I'd vote to include 2) as a distinct Export parameter even if some other options forced it to be on.

The third option would also allow for different sizes of images to be output in the same Export run, since replicating Crop dimensions to Export sizing wouldn't require the same set of dimensions be specified like happens now.
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As far as Adobe doing any of these, I could see their counter argument to be that someone wanting precise pixel dimensions not even off by one is likely not a photographer but someone doing web design or desktop publishing or maybe video work and therefore should be paying for at least Photoshop that has many more sizing options in the Image / Size panel so can easily do what is being requested. In other words we (Adobe) already have tools that accommodate these wishes and they aren't that common for basic photography processing so why should be add them for our discounted photographer-centric Lightroom product when we want them to sign up for the half-price LR+PS $10/month subscription. In other words, don't hold your breath, or at least tell why you want to be able to specify precise dimensions so Adobe can judge the photographer-ness of the request. Everyone who is not a photographer they want to pay the $50/month full-suite subscription price that is for businesses to pay, not photographers that are just scraping by and need a discount.

I do agree that Crop numbers should be part of the properties available to plug-in SDK, at least readonly so you could translate them to Export dimensions, but also perhaps settable so you could correct for off-by-one errors by tweaking the crop of the image being sent to the Export step on the fly, without having to resort to ImageMagick or a PS Droplet or similar post-processing steps.

You're close, and that much would be a big step in the right direction, but it would also be beneficial for crop dimensions to be interpreted as an actual number of pixels, for times when you really want to assure no resizing upon export, or exact halfing..