Cut-Out cropping

The only benefit to adding that feature that I can see vs using the existing Drawing Rectangle is that it would not introduce a layered object. Having said that, I think the latter is more flexible because it can be resized after the fact, changing its color / border / etc. is simple, and it is layered!

In my tests I found issues with which arrangement options are available to layered obects but that’s another matter. Having any support of layers is an added benefit IMHO and full-blown layer support (incl. merging of layers, etc) is unrealistic.

@Schof I understood it that you do it like a normal crop, but the area you select is “cut out”, and with this is the question, what is going to be at the location of the cutout? White? Transparent? I think we need a configurable color… But I do not understand the usage that well.

Is the middle cut-out the equivalent of performing both a horizontal and vertical cut-out at the same time? If so I can see the benefit in terms of time saving but having the ability to do the operations individually is the main requirement (in my opinion).

Thanks!!!

@Robin Krom - thank you so much for making this happen and all the time you spend on this great tool!
As a long-time lurker on this thread I’m very happy about seeing this feature implemented

Regarding the middle crop-out: I assume this means selecting a region an cutting it out - would be handy, but I personally don’t see this as a high priority.

It’s not needed to apologize, but I accept them nevertheless. My main point was making people understand that if they use free software it comes as is, they can request features and it does helps knowing that many want it (+1), but it doesn’t help when everybody is asking “when does it come? And it’s STILL not there. So many time has passed, why?”. Even if I explain the why, it doesn’t finish the feature and in fact it takes energy away from it. This is the same with many of my “colleagues” who work on other repositories.

Some background information might be in place: I have a lot of changes on my plate, and some are really at the core of Greenshot, I worked on Version 2 but due to issues with the .NET version I wanted to move to, I had to postpone this and that took so long, I decided to keep fixing the version 1. Most of the work for version 2 was now a waste of time, and I probably have to do it again. That means that a feature like this, which helps some users, doesn’t bring Greenshot forward on the whole. I will have to touch it again, maybe completely rewrite it, when I rebuild the editor, this slows me down in the future.

It’s always a tradeoff between what the users want or need, vs. making the project sustainable. Because someone in the community made a pull-request (PR), I at least do not have to spend the initial time building it, but as soon as the PR is there the work for me starts with reviews and aligning it, and after it’s merged (put into Greenshot), the contributor is usually finished but for me the maintenance starts.

This combined with the fact that I have a kid with extreme ADHD and a daytime job, leaves little time for normal chores, and even less for Greenshot. When some donations come in, this does help me as I can invest this in a good laptop or other things I need for some features (like the high-DPI / 4k issues), and sometimes I can have someone support me with chores.

In general this means that it will not help if a lot of people start writing pull-requests with their favorite features, I’m pretty much the bottleneck integrating them and I will not be able to maintain all of them. This is especially true for cloud services, any disturbances with them in production makes people report issues in our Jira / GitHub trackers and also the suppliers change their APIs regularly which means I must maintain them.

Anyway, I did make a HUGE list of improvements to Greenshot over the last years, look at the list: https://github.com/greenshot/greenshot/releases/tag/v1.3.239

And now I’m really happy with this new feature, which certainly adds value to Greenshot. I hope to have a beta of this available in the next days. What we still have open, is the translations but I might merge it without. One minor thing that was on the list is a crop-out in the middle (not the whole width or height but a rectangle), I do not see a huge benefit there but I love to hear some ideas why that is needed?