Download CascadeTool for Linux, Windows and Mac
One of the tedious tasks with social media management is making sure your images are properly sized and cropped for each individual social network.
Each service has a multitude of different formats depending on whether you're creating portraits, cover photos, stories or any other type of media. See this guide by Hootsuite to really understand the size of the problem.
There are a number of cloud-based solutions, but if you're using a third-party posting app like Buffer, where you need to attach images to your post, or you just want to keep your assets on your computer for future use, then you end up endlessly downloading and sorting files.
It can be a very tedious, repetitive job.
The second problem is that the resizing tool in most paint apps doesn't work very well without a lot of manual intervention. In most cases the tool will just crop around the centre of the image, causing the subject to be cut off or, even worse, missing altogether.
CascadeTool to the rescue
CascadeTool is a small utility app I've written which lets you bulk crop photos using an AI algorithm and outputs each image in every popular social network format.
Smart crop
CascadeTool uses an AI algorithm to identify the 'busy' area of an image (the area with most edges or colour saturation) and centres the crop around it.
In most cases this will be the area which the photographer intended to be the focus of the image. I say 'most cases' since it doesn't always work but it's surprising how often it does.
Resize for every social network
CascadeTool knows about nearly every image format used by Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. When you smart crop an image it resizes and crops to every single one.
To run:
Here is an example of resizing an image into all popular social media formats (here I'm using PowerShell on Linux, Windows or Mac, but any shell will work - you'll just need to switch backslashes to forward slashes on Linux & Mac):
.\CascadeTool smartcrop --path .\Elegy-for-my-Fathers-Father.jpg
This command takes the source image described by the --path argument and generates images ready-to-use in all the popular social networks.
Finally
I hope this helps. If you have any problems simply tweet me @paul1664.
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