Hello,

I have one of those feed-through (not flatbed) scanners. There is a program for Windows that will keep scanning (and saving) images as long as I keep feeding them every so many seconds. Furthermore, this program automatically detects the size of the scanned picture and saves only the area containing the picture (even though a large area is returned by the scanner.)

This lets me use the following workflow with multiple pictures of varying sizes:

1. Turn on the scanner.
2. Start the software.
3. Select the save directory.
4. Insert a picture in the scanner.
5. Tell the software "start scanning"
6. Insert the next picture.
7. Goto 6 until finished with pictures.

No manual sizing, no selecting from previews, no scanning pictures twice. Just insert, insert, insert until I'm out of pictures and everything just works.

Does anybody know of software for Linux that will do the same thing?

Everything I've found so far either makes you specify the size with coordinates or select the picture area from a preview, which means for a collection of varied-size snapshots, you have to do extra work for each picture.

Simple-scan will let you keep scanning, but it won't auto-crop. XSane makes you select your crop from a preview, which means feeding each picture through twice, or specify coordinates, which means measuring each picture.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can point me to something with the auto-crop feature.

-Dan

Couple of thoughts:
Is the Windows program perhaps also available for Linux?
I do scanning in Windows with software provided by the scanner manufacturer. Does the manufacture of your scanner have software for Linux?

Not that I'm aware of. This reads like an application-specific feature, and none of the Linux scanner applications have that AFAIK.

However, 'imagemagick' (image editor application) might be of help to you with little additional effort to auto-crop the 'full-sized' scanned images perhaps...

https://pebblesinthesand.wordpress.c...h-imagemagick/
*This application can batch process a directory of images and apply the desired transformation using its convert CLI tool.

There is also 'phatch' an open source photo batch processing utility that might also work for you, in that it supports a wide-range of formats (inc PDF), and can process images including auto-cropping
http://photobatch.wikidot.com/

Thank you for the suggestions. The scanner I have puts a yellow background for scanned areas with no media and a darker yellow background for parts no scanned (e.g., you put a 4x6 picture through and the scanner returns an 8.5x11 page - to the right of the picture is yellow, and below the picture is dark yellow). I think this could aid with an approach using imagemagick, and I might try to rig up a script-based environment using scanimage and imagemagick.

The Windows program in question is, indeed, from the manufacturer. As far as I've been able to find, the only Linux support they have is for a sane driver (which I use), but I'll check more closely.

Again, thanks for the suggestions.

Take a look at VueScan (www.hamrick.com). Might do what you need. It's payware, though.