How to split an image for visual effects

Suppose that you've just taken a panorama photograph with your fancy digital camera.

You can display the picture as is on your blog. Or you can be a little bit more creative. How about splitting it up into 3 rectangular pieces?

Or even into 2 rows like the following.

To crop a photo into rectangular pieces, use the convert program from the ImageMagick software suite. If your system runs on Debian or Ubuntu, install ImageMagick like this:

$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick

The original panorama image (P3190007.JPG) is 4256 x 1144 pixels in width and height respectively. The following command crops the image into tiles of 1419 x 1144 pixels. The output files are named tile_, and numbered sequentially starting from 0.

$ convert -crop 1419x1144 P3190007.JPG tile_%d.JPG
$ ls -al tile*
-rw-r--r-- 1 peter peter 337615 Nov 19 21:45 tile_0.JPG
-rw-r--r-- 1 peter peter 300873 Nov 19 21:45 tile_1.JPG
-rw-r--r-- 1 peter peter 315006 Nov 19 21:45 tile_2.JPG

The convert program can automatically calculate the width and height dimensions of the output tiles. You simply tell it the number of columns and rows. For example, '3x1@' means 3 columns and 1 row.

$ convert -crop 3x1@ P3190007.JPG  tile_%d.JPG

If you want to stitch the component images back together, execute the following command:

$ convert tile_*.JPG +append output.JPG

The +append parameter tells convert to join the images side by side. If, for whatever reason, you want to stack them up vertically, specify -append instead.