A while ago, I was doing a project where I needed to cut an image into small pieces so a user could click on different parts to trigger different actions. It was a fun little project but cutting the image up was quite difficult.
I found that surprising because there used to be websites that cut images into smaller bits so that the bits could load progressively. It was supposed to seem faster. Well, the web’s moved on and these sorts of things aren’t needed as much these days.
Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any easy tools to cut a picture into two parts. I’d have thought that, given people used to do this, there’d be thousands around. Probably people just used photoshop. Perhaps, if you’re good with that, the process is fairly straight forward. For me (using MSPaint) the process was pretty painful.
What is annoying with the nice artistic, creative tools is the lack of precision. The arty tools are great at selecting something that looks right but they don’t give you the off cuts. I needed to keep the whole image. I just needed it cut in certain places. The cuts needed to be exact. The halves had to go back together again.
I muddled through at the time but it was very tedious. I had to be careful of exactly where I cut to. I had to write down the coordinates so I could then cut from that exact same spot for the next step. I did it at the time; but I swore I’d also come back and solve this one.
CutPic is the solution. It lets you cut a picture into two bits. You make one cut and get two new image files. The left hand side and the right hand side; or the top and the bottom. Once you have that, you can cut an original any way you need and into as many pieces as you need. You can have them all the same size or every piece can be a different size (if that’s what you need).
