How can I split an image into multiple files with an action in photoshop?
I use Stamps.com to print shipping labels that are 2.4" wide. Stamps.com unfortunately will only generate a pdf of this size label with 4 labels on the sheet. It is not paginated, and will not print sequentially. Their template assumes you will print it out on an 8.5" x 11" label sheet and peel off from there. Four Label 8.5x`11 sheet
I want to print on a thermal, continuous roll printer which cuts each label out automatically. To have this work I need each label to be one page, and the pdf with four labels split into four cropped files of 2.4" x 8.5". Any ideas?
I have failed so far in making an action in both acrobat, and photoshop. Should I be looking into solving this programmatically outside of photoshop?
I would be inclined to do that with ImageMagick which is installed on most Linux distros and is available for OSX and Windows.
Unfortunately, you haven't provided a sensible sample image, so I'll provide a fake one. I have made the border yellow intentionally so you can see it on StackOverflow's white page layout.
Just at the command line in the Terminal, you would want to set the default density so that when ImageMagick rasterises the image it retains its quality. The [0] refers to the first page of the PDF. Then you would want to trim off the border - whatever colour it is (+/- a small fuzz factor to allow for variations in image encoding) and then tile into 4 equal horizontal strips. So, your command would be:
convert -density 240 stamps.pdf[0] fuzz 20% -trim -crop x4@ f-%d.jpg
and you will get 4 files out, called f-0.jpg, f-1.jpg, f-2.jpg and f-3.jpg
