Lossless JPG cropper?

I'm looking for a lossless JPG editor which can crop JPGs without recompression. Preferably freeware.. but if someone can point me in the direction of a cracked BetterJPEG with a working link or seeded torrent, that would also be appreciated.

Hmm, I don't know of any one but you should know that lossless cropping (cropping without recompression) is only possible when cropping on a block-border. Otherwise the blocks that lie on the cropping-frame have to be reencoded. So it's not lossless, but nearly lossless... :-)

OK, I was wrong. Today I refreshed by knowledge about JPEG basics like DCT, quantization error and bitstream encoding and found this:
http://jpegclub.org/

Especially interesting should be the jpegtran (JPEG transcode) utility that support lossless rotation (I don't think for arbitrary degrees) and lossless cropping.

EDIT: There even seem to be some win32 GUI apps that incorporate the functionality. So if you're no console guy...

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

EDIT: There even seem to be some win32 GUI apps that incorporate the functionality. So if you're no console guy...

Good, since most Windows users nowadays don't care about consoles...

Now since the Windows commandline sucks big time I'm not wondering at all... ;-)

Is there a particular reason you need to avoid recompression? I should've asked that in your other thread. Unless you've got extremely volatile images, I don't see any reason why you'd need to go to such extremes to avoid recompression. And if they're that affected by compression, why aren't you simply using a lossless format? Just sayin'.

Maybe because his source data is already in JPEG and he doesn't want to a loss of quality? That's the same reason there exist tools like mp3DirectCut.

Yes, his source data's already in JPEG, I know that. But why keep it in JPEG if it's going to adversely impact the graphical data? Did he have a choice initially to not use JPEG at all on the data? If your image that affected by lossy compression, there isn't a need to use JPEG, ever. If it isn't greatly affected, who cares. I can tell a JPEG when I see one, and for the most part I don't cringe, unless it's on something like pixel art.

That's all. Uh, good luck though! :D

Originally Posted by Overkill

But why keep it in JPEG if it's going to adversely impact the graphical data?

It's not impacting the graphical data. It's only impacting the manipulation of the graphical data. And this problem seems to be solved because such transformation tool exists.

Originally Posted by Overkill

Did he have a choice initially to not use JPEG at all on the data?

Because it's a bad idea to start with a source image that is in JPEG format, decompress it to a raw uncompressed bitmap, do the transformation and then compress it a second time, either with a lossless codec or a lossy one. Both methods are not optimal because
a) your destination image is generally larger than the source image (I doubt that any lossless image codec can use the fact that some image data was previously DCT-transformed and quantized)
b) image quality is degraded when re-compressing with the same or some other codec

Originally Posted by Overkill

If it isn't greatly affected, who cares.

Maybe he cares....

Originally Posted by Overkill

I can tell a JPEG when I see one, and for the most part I don't cringe, unless it's on something like pixel art.

That's your opinion. There are a lot of people which need this lossless transformations, otherwise such software/code wouldn't exist.

It seems a bit funny to me that on the one hand people are crazy when it comes to this new HD technologies with higher and higher resolution and on the other hand they recompress JPEGs, edit MP3s by decoding them first, use the onboard integrated soundchip , etc. (long list here)
Maybe the meaning of quality has gone absent...

have you found the program yet? I have a small program (with crack) that can crop jpegs losslessly. Lemme know.