u/Little_Noodles

Those of you working in fields where encountering social security numbers is a recurring thing …. What’s the latest best practice on handling SSNs of people known to be dead?

I don’t run into this often in my repository, but I’m looking at it now, and the documents involved would be great additions to our digital archives.

The people associated with the SSNs are absolutely, known for a fact, dead. These are not active numbers. To the best of my knowledge, they can’t be used for anything (can they?).

As best I can tell, it’s just a matter of redacting to make people feel comfortable and have things “look” right vs. my convenience and just tossing in a note that says “this isn’t an active SSN”.

I'm shopping some Photoshop alternatives, as I use it for work, but I'm not looking to pay for it for WFH use, and neither is my job. I don't need the software to do much. Mostly looking to replace a handful of pretty straightforward tasks, but one of those tasks is best suited to automation.

So far, solo trial and error efforts have been a bust. I just tried Affinity, and its macro tools (their Photoshop actions analogue) won't do what I need them to. It seems like GIMP might, but it's going to be a heavy damn lift. Same for a few other scripting tools I looked at.

I just downloaded Krita, and so far, it's functionality is intuitively the friendliest for what I need to do (like, just starting with the option to create a copy of the current image in a single click already puts it above the others I've tried).

It does look like if I want to recreate Photoshop's Actions tools, I need to add the paid Augmented Brush plug-in, which is fine. It's a small, one-time fee and I'm happy to do that, especially for solo developers.

Before I do that, though, since I've ran into so many obstacles so far, can anyone tell me if automating this process will be a problem for some reason?

• Create a duplicate copy of an image and open it in a new tab (I did this pretty easily already, so I know Krita can do it)
• Crop the original image based on a set percentage of the original width (also something that was easily accomplished)
• Navigate to the new tab (here's where other apps have failed me)
• Crop the new image in the new tab based on a different set percentage of the original width

I'm shopping some Photoshop alternatives, as I use it for work, but I'm not looking to pay for it for WFH use, and neither is my job. I don't need the software to do much. Mostly looking to replace a handful of pretty straightforward tasks, but one of those tasks is best suited to automation.

So far, solo trial and error efforts have been a bust. I just tried Affinity, and its macro tools (their Photoshop actions analogue) won't do what I need them to, so onto the next thing.

It sounds like, for GIMP, the actions analogue is BIMP. Here's what I need it to do.

• Create a duplicate copy of an image and open it in a new tab
• Crop the new image based on a set percentage of the original width
• Navigate back to the original tab and crop that image to a different set percentage of the original width

Affinity's macros don't navigate between tabs, so it can eat it. All the other things I need to do are very basic (drag a line to straighten, rotate, select an area using a magic wand style tool, fill using a content-aware function).

If it's remotely possible that GIMP could import .atn files so I don't have to recreate everything manually, that would be amazing, but I know that's a long shot.

I'm shopping some Photoshop alternatives, as I use it for work, but I'm not looking to pay for it for WFH use, and neither is my job. I don't need the software to do much. Mostly looking to replace a handful of pretty straightforward tasks.

Testing out Affinity right now - I don't love it, but I'm chalking it up to the inevitable "this is slightly different so I hate it" learning curve and being annoyed that the million things I don't use get in the way of finding the five I do. One thing I would love some input on though, is about macros.

I've automated the most complicated part of what I use Photoshop for by creating custom actions, and they're exported into .atn files so they can be imported into other machines using Photoshop. As best I can tell though, there's no converting them into files Affinity can use. So I'm trying to recreate them, and it's going rough.

The one I use the most splits book images into verso and recto (it duplicates the image, then splits each left and right based on a percentage I select). I'm trying to record a macro to recreate it, and I get as far as being able to duplicate the image, but I can't get the macro recording to follow me to the new canvas.

Is this just not something Affinity can do?