It’s a cold Saturday morning, and my friend, noted author, volunteer firefighter and techno aesthete John Sundman posted the following Twitter query.

I have a few pictures, same dimensions, that I want to assemble into 1 jpeg banner. What's easiest way to do that on a mac? Thanks.

— john sundman (@jsundmanus) January 31, 2015

Ah ha! A question with an answer I stumbled on a few days ago.

To make a quick image, like a banner, out of similarly sized images on a recent Mac, here’s a quick hack.

1) Determine the size of your image. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s use 600 x 200px.

2) Open up a blank page in whatever easy text editing program you prefer. Myself, I prefer Taco HTML Edit.

3) In the text editing program, take a screenshot (CMD + SHIFT + 4) of an image in a size roughly approximate to your desired image size.

4) Rename the blank screenshot to something easy to remember. Perhaps, mybanner.png.

5) Open the blank screenshot (mybanner.png) in Preview.app.

6) Resize the blank screenshot to your desired image size (Tools > Adjust Size), in this case 600 x 200px. Save your resized image.

7) Open the other images you wish to work with in Preview.app, edit them as desired, and Copy + Paste the images into your blank screenshot (mybanner.png).

8) Continue editing and don’t forget to save your work!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2015 at 10:38 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.