How do I split multiple snapshots scanned into one big jpeg into individual jpegs for each snapshot?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
January 30, 2022
2 replies
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To streamline a process of preserving and digitizing a collections of old family snapshots, I would load up as many as I could fit on the pane of a flatbed scanner and scan them all into one high-res jpeg. Example below. I did it this way becauase I remember a capability in Photoshop Elements more than a decade ago that could identify that multiple images were present and create separate jpegs for each component image. Is there such a capability in Photoshop?

macOS

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Conrad_C

Community Expert

Crop and Straighten Photos is the best answer within Photoshop, but over the years it hasn’t gotten any smarter. That is a problem for the sample attached to the original post. When I download and run that through Crop and Straighten Photos, Photoshop produces this:

(The last one is the original, so that’s OK.)

The reason there are incomplete and incorrectly extracted photos is that Crop and Straighten Photos looks for photo rectangles on a solid white background. But any time you feed it an image where the background behind the photos is not solid white, it can get confused. In this example, what confuses the feature is that bold, non-photographic background behind the photos.

Whenever possible, remove the photos from any existing page background, and lay out the photos with a solid white background, like what you would naturally get with the scanner lid. And if they are borderless photos, leave space between the photos. The diagram below is an example of a clean, ideal scan layout that Crop and Straighten Photos can easily take apart accurately.

If we’re lucky, in the future maybe Crop and Straighten Photos will be updated with machine learning, to more accurately identify individual photos out of a scanned snapshot group on a background that isn’t perfectly solid. But that day is not yet here.