Is there a software to automatically crop a scan of multiple images?

Question

I want to digitize my old family albums using a scanner and there are lots of photos in them. Thus far, my method has been to scan 4 images at a time and then manually cropping them in a simple editor like Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery. This has been pretty time consuming as each scan is followed by 4 crop operations. Scanning each image individually would possibly be even more time consuming.

Is there any software or simple plugin (preferably free) that does this job? The best solution I have found is in Photoshop, but that's an overkill. Is there a similar feature for one of the free photo editors like Paint.NET or GIMP?

Answer

If you don't know the crop boundary then you can use Fred Weinhaus's multicrop script (this script also uses Imagemagick). The script also handles different photo sizes and rotated images.

Example (book covers):

Scanned image (input.tiff):

multicrop input.tiff output.tiff

Result:

output-0.tiff:

output-1.tiff:

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