Area GIMP plug-in

2001, Miroslav Spousta, <qiq@ucw.cz>

1. Overview

Area is a GIMP plug-in and it was created in order to easily count area of objects on geographic maps.

The procedure is simple:

First, you have to create an electronic version of the map, GIMP could be used for scanning
Next, you have to select the object which you want to know the area of. This is as simple as filling the object with selected colour.
And you are done! Now launch the Area plug-in (Image section), fill in DPI of an image and the scale and you will immediately see the area in square meters or kilometers.

2. Download and Instalation

Area plug-in is available for Linux only. You can download Area for GIMP 1.0, 1.2 or 2.2+ (patch provided by Hannes Rotzinger).

Instalation is quite simple:

$ tar -xzvf area-gimp-2.2.tar.gz
area-gimp-2.2/
area-gimp-2.2/libgimp/
area-gimp-2.2/libgimp/gimpintl.h
area-gimp-2.2/libgimp/stdplugins-intl.h
area-gimp-2.2/area.c
$ gimptool --install area.c
$

3. Example Usage

We will count the area of the yellow filled part of the image:

After loading an image, you can select Area item in the Image menu. Enter DPI and map scale in the dialog and see the result.

In case of a very large image, it is more efficient to select the area where the object lies. In this case only pixels in this selected area are counted.

Enjoy!