What happens to...

[MagusAugury]

Thank You

 

[tirediron]

Welcome to the forum and the addiction. With respect to your question, cropping a photograph and then saving the resultant image is no different than writing a Word document, deleting a paragraph and re-saving it. The digital information that represented those words or that portion of the image is gone. Now, depending on the size of the image (in Kb/Mb terms) the amount cropped, your computer's OS, your FAT structure, and HDD block/sector sizes, you could probably find some of that information on your HDD after, but it would take someone with specialized knowledge and tools. Not likely to happen. In simplest terms, considered it erased rather than cut off.

 

[KmH]

the part of the photo after you crop it on your pc? When I crop family photos on my PC I always wondered what happens to the part that has been cropped off. Does it just sit on my HD or what? I'm a beginner to photography and am falling in love with it quickly, I especially like to crop my photos to give them a different look and feel. It's an addictive hobby for me.
Thank You

The cropped part gets tossed in the bit bucket.
If you crop the original, the cropped part of the photo is gone.

Rule #1 in image editing is "Only edit a copy of the original. Never, ever, edit the original".

 

[MagusAugury]

ThX!

 

[Big Mike]

The 'original images' are the ones that come off of your camera, onto your computer. If you upload them, that puts a 'copy' of the files onto the internet hosting site....but you should still have your originals on your computer. As long as you don't edit the files before you upload them, you could say that they are the 'original version' of your photos.

So do you erase/delete the image files from your computer, leaving only the on-line version?

If you open an image file in your editing program, then crop (or anything)...how do you save it? If you just choose 'save', then you are probably overwriting the image that you started with. If you choose 'save as...', then you are saving a copy, leaving the original intact. This is the recommended way to do it.

As for what happens when you overwrite an image file, like Tirediron said, the old file may be lurking somewhere, but basically, consider it gone.

 

[KmH]

Computers today cannot erase anything in a data file stored on a hard drive. Hard drives don't have an erase head. All they can do is over write. Computers just change a bit in the File Allocation Table to show that a range of memory addresses is again available to be written to.

That's why data recovery software can work if data hasn't been over written.

 

[Derrel]

Another thing I have noticed: a number of image viewer applications allow the user to "Reveal Original File" or "Show Original Crop" on images which have been cropped...so...it would seem that at times, depending on the software used, cropping a file does not actually eliminate the extraneous pixels, but merely creates a new instruction set telling software what to display, while at the same time, allowing the original, un-cropped image to be revealed with a command.