If you do a lot of photographic touch-up, you’re familiar with the drill for cropping: select the tool, draw a rectangle within the image, squint and try and picture the photo alone, drag the rectangle or target one of its corners to resize it, apply the crop, and then judge the results. Repeat if necessary. Do this for dozens of events, dozens of times a year.
Within a few moments of playing with the iPad’s photo browser, two things became apparent: 1. there is a better way to crop, and 2. multi-touch, despite the hype, really does have some advantages over the mouse.
The iPad’s photo browser lets you grab an image with two fingers to both pan it and resize it with a single fluid motion. On the iPad you are merely zooming into a picture to check out your friend’s pores. But it’s clearly a faster and more fun way to crop images.
I haven’t yet seen cropping done this way, so it constitutes today’s idea to steal.
[Researchers: It would be interesting to validate this claim by comparing the time to crop between using the mouse vs. multi-touch method.]
This scenario also exemplifies a sweet advantage of multi-touch over mouse, which is that it lets you do multiple direct manipulation operations at once. Cropping is one fluid operation, as opposed to many micro-interactions to do the same task with a mouse: targeting edges and corners of the crop rectangle with a mouse and dragging them.
That said, you can potentially accomplish a similar fluid crop operation with today’s mouse.
- User selects the crop tool. A crop rectangle appears at the largest possible size.
- User presses turns the mouse wheel to enlarge the photo within the frame.
- User drags the image around within the frame
This method eliminates the picky targeting of edges and corners in regular cropping.
