Dave: I think your argument that I should pay the high cost for the Pro version because I use Sketchup to make some things to sell doesn't hold water. I use a LOT of other software as part of my business too: MS Word, Excel and other aspects of MS Office, Outlook, Video making software, music recording software etc etc etc. All of these are just as important as my CAD design software, but they don't charge an arm and a leg - and they don't try and police what I can use them for, as you seem to be wanting to do on behalf of Trimble. The other software makers I use charge a reasonable annual fee, which feels fair. As noted, I'd be happy to pay a reasonable amount to continue using an updated version of Sketchup Make, and I believe many other Make users would too. But the Pro version fees don't feel reasonable by comparison with these other softwares.
Sure, you can point to several other professional CAD programs that cost a lot more than Sketchup Pro. But Sketchup is different, because of how it developed and the many years that Sketchup Make was free to use. It made Sketchup much loved, hugely successful, and generated the enthusiastic body of keen expert users (like Fredo) who devised wonderful plugins and extensions. After many years of that positivity, for Trimble to make a unilateral decision to ditch Make without consulting their community feels to many like a kind of betrayal. Because long-time users love Skethup, they feel hurt as well as angry. In my opinion Trimble should take note of the huge amount of negative feedback they've received over abruptly stopping Make, and do something about it in the way I suggested. That will ensure long-term users remain loyal and don't ditch the program altogether as Make 2017 gets further and further behind the times.
What I'm experiencing is a case in point. I want to use Fredo Portait's extra functionality and make a thankful donation to Fredo for it , but I can't because it's only available in Pro. For now that's a deal breaker, unfortunately.
Thanks for your suggestion Fredo. Actually I am already using an image editor to crop the images in the 10 tedious steps I listed at the top of the other thread: MS Paint. I just had a quick look to see if there is an image editor that does cropping which is any better than MS Paint, but they all seem to involve the same process: make a manual selection box around the image, then crop.
If you know of one where you just click on a discrete area of colour (black in the case of my images) and it does automatic cropping, I'd love to hear of it. That would be a decent half-way solution - not as good as the extra features of Portrait, but better than what I'm doing.
Thanks to both of you for taking the time and trouble to answer my posts, and those of the many other Sketchup users on Sketchucation. Though we might differ on some things, one thing we have in common is that we all love this quirky old software! ![:smile: π](https://community.sketchucation.com/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f604.png?v=3orp1bvic7q)