I am trying to upload a portrait picture onto Facebook as a profile picture. I need ALL of the picture to show but it always cuts some of the picture off because it resizes it to a be a square. I would like to resize in aperture and maybe fix this by adding borders to two of the sides. How can I do this?
Larissa,
So to be sure I understand, you are trying to take a vertical photo and make the file square by adding padding to the sides, so that Facebook doesn’t cut it up?
There’s a few ways you could do this. The all-Aperture way would be to create a book, make a custom book that’s square, then add the photo to a square page and position it however you like. Export that single page as a JPG (I think you’ll need to print to JPG, if I recall) and that will work. But it’s considerable effort… unless you plan on doing this often, I’d take an easier approach.
Of course if you have Photoshop or another similar app, you can just export the photo from Aperture and pad it in that app.
Or you could do it using Automator. Launch Automator, create a new workflow using “Pad Images”, enter the size you want and be sure to enable “Scale”. Hmm doesn’t look like you can alter the color though, so maybe it’ll just be black which may not be what you want. Anyway if you export the photo from Aperture, create this action then even without saving it, just create it, select the photo and run it, it will create the result. The two things you need in the script is a “get selected files” (that’ll run the script on whatever is selected in the finder) and then the Pad action, like this: [screenshot].
There are Aperture plugins that will add borders as well but I’ve never used any.
@PhotoJoseph
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Yes, you understood that perfectly! Thank you for your help, I will try that right away!
Ok, I didn’t even know that Automator existed but it seems I have it! I’ll have to study up on what it does! I created a new workflow using pad images. Black is perfect for the background, but now I’m confused again. I was able to follow your instructions up till the last sentence. When I clicked on your screenshot link, it said ‘page not found’. I dragged the photo from the ‘get selected files’ action to the pad images action but when i ran the workflow, it tried to open Fetch. And some errors converting data occurred. I have never used fetch either and it said something about getting an update. Am I on the right track? Thanks so much for your help!
Larissa,
Oops, my script for pasting the URL in above failed me. I’ve corrected the link; you can now click on the “screenshot” text above.
-Joseph
@PhotoJoseph
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GOT IT! Thank you! I was having a problem because I couldn’t figure out how to select the photo. Then I just drag and dropped it from the desk top into the workflow and it all suddenly worked. Thanks for you help!
Great!
@PhotoJoseph
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