Simple image editor for basic manipulation

[Gordon McLeod]

New Feature Request
Mahara is an incredibly visual tool, and I've seen issues with displaying images often enough that I thought it was worth suggesting this as a useful feature. In an ideal world users will do all of their editing on dedicated software before loading a finished image, but in reality it's not always an option, and if mobile submission has been setup to allow users to send content from their mobile devices straight to Mahara it becomes even more useful to have these features.

When loading an image from a computer the orientation data associated with the image doesn't always match what the user sees on their own computer (especially Apple devices). Two basic editing tools would greatly enhance Mahara functionality - a rotate image tool (by 90 degrees per click), and a crop tool to trim displayed images. There are other features that could be added - but I believe those are the two that would have the biggest impact.

Rather than suggesting something is created from scratch - there are existing open source or free web applications (eg below) that might provide a starting point for a tool that could be incorporated.
Ribbet - http://www.ribbet.com/photo-editing-api
JPEGview - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jpegview/

Regards, Gordon.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

We had discussed this previously just for the purpose of rotating images. And we recently revisited the idea when a university student was working on the MaharaDroid app and was researching some Javascript-based systems for rotating images (and other manipulations).

As Gordon said, there are some mature existing libraries for this, and we'd want to use one of those.

Additionally, as I mentioned on the other bug, the easiest way to incorporate this into Mahara would be to put it in the File -> Contents file editing area (the same place you can change a file's name, tags, etc.)

Bonus points for somehow incorporating it into the file upload system, but that would be more challenging.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

See also Bug 1498936, which is strictly about adding a "rotate 90 degrees" button.

[Domi Sinclair (domi-sinclair)]

Just wanted to add that I agree with this request.

The ability to rotate and crop images after upload would be great. It is a request we have had from users a few times.

Best wishes,

Domi