Neurotic artwork question - How can I make perfectly square artwork?

[kavika411]

Thank for reading this. My question is admittedly obsessive, but I'm hoping someone can give me a tip. Album artwork is very important to me. As we all know, most artwork is available through iTunes, and comes in a nice, perfect square. Occasionally, the artwork that iTunes downloads, or that I have to go search out, is rectangular.

Here comes the neurotic part. I want all of my artwork to be perfectly square. The best and only method I know of to accomplish this is to open the artwork, and then use the shift-command-"4" trick to create a box over a portion of the artwork and take a square "snapshot" of it. There are two problems with that method. First, it takes more steps than would seem necessary. Second, and more importantly, I can't make a perfect square; I am at the mercy of my not-so-strong mouse/squaring off abilities.

So, my question is this: do any of you know how to quickly create a perfect square for purposes of album artwork? Thank you.

[RedTomato]

Eh I've never used iTunes, but you could open a bunch of images in Photoshop and square them off there?

Another way is often with selections, holding down shift, or command, or option or some other key, will keep your selection perfectly square. That happens in many programs, and it's not always clearly documented.

[tersono]

If you look carefully at the cursor that is created when you do CMD-Shift-4, you'll see there are numerical values alongside. Get both values the same and bingo, you have a square.

[Krevnik]

Another route is to use iPhoto. It has a square crop option, and you can archive the original and the cropped version in iPhoto as well. I have an album I use to store all my iTunes artwork in case I need it again.

[kavika411]

Thank you for your suggestions.

[TheSpecialist]

Sometimes I'm so happy I already now this tricks.

Here's how.
Open the song with the album art with Command+I.
Go to the artwork tab.
Select the picture with the mouse.
Command+C to copy it.
Open Photoshop.
Make a new document, Command+N.
Command+V to past it.
Go to the image menu, and select image size.
Look at what the biggest pixel size of the 2 could be (like 600x400).
Delete the 400, and type in 600.
Shift+Command+S, save it to the desktop as JPEG.
Select the song for the artwork, and embed the JPEG in it.

You know have perfectly square artwork, without quality loss^^