Long story incredibly short… I have tried clipping an image, cropping the clipped image, and covering portions of the image to avoid engraving excess parts I don’t want. Cropping the clipped image got me to the point of being able to eliminate the majority of the excess parts of the image, but I also wanted a portion of the image covered by a vector path to be blank as well (basically wanted it to round the edges off to give a specific look). Unfortunately, when I actually ran the project through meerk40t, though the area was visibly covered in the SVG file shown IN meerk40t, the whole image still engraved on the wood. How do I rectify this situation? Or is there even a fix to begin with (can the software support such a thing… similar to how it currently doesn’t support vector gradients)?
Meerk40t doesn’t (yet) suport clipping (because the SVGElements library it uses doesn’t support clipping). So you need to permanently apply the clip to it (e.g. by duplicating the clipped object and hiding the original and then applying the clip to it).
What seems to have worked for me, as of now, has been clipping the image as I want as it’s own separate file, exporting the clipped image to a PNG and then importing the saved PNG into the original image with the other elements besides the clipped image. I make a few coasters this way as a test… but I’m not sure I like the fact that the code does each image raster separately even if they are on the same horizontal plane vs covering the full left to right process over all the images at once. Not sure, at the moment, which is more efficient.
Inkscape has a crop to clip. You clip the image to a path, then you crop to clip and unclip and save. Should load into MK without any problems.
Unfortunately, failure of that feature to work with meerk40t is why this subject has a thread here. Clipped images are unclipped WITHIN meerk40t once loaded. 
Fortunately if you follow my instructions the image is cropped not cliped.
- Clip the image
- Crop the image to the clip
- Remove the clip
I tried that and it didn’t take.
Well I did it only yesterday evening and it worked just fine for me. What version of Inkscape are you running?
I’ll have to check… its relatively new, if not the newest version of inkscape. And I have the newest version of meerk40t as well.
I use 1.3.
In the object tree select the image and the clip path and right click and select Set Path. I can’t remember which needs to be higher in the tree, but if the image clips the path instead of the other way around, undo and swap the positions in the tree and retry it.
Then in the tree select the image that results, and right click and select Crop to Clip.
Then right click again and select Release clip.
Then save and import into Meerk40t. If it pops up an alert about clip paths and running Inkscape just say Load into Meerk40t.
The actual crop to clip function fails. I tested it repeatedly on the same image with no response and no error prompt. It just seems to literally do nothing. Just updated everything to latest version today before trying.
The Crop to Clip function appears to do nothing because the bits that are cropped are already hidden by the clip.
But if you release the clip afterwards, you will see that the clipped parts are gone.
No, I mean legitimately its doing nothing. When I release, the image is still whole and when I open the file in meerk40t the image is still in its original state. Nothing is actually changing.
Well all I can say is that I did exactly these instructions and it worked for me.
The issue here is that clipping paths is not the same as removing paths… When you clip a path it is not being displayed in editors and browsers. but it is still present in the .svg file itself.
I suspect MeerK40t (as with Laserweb) just looks for the paths in the file, and doesn’t understand the concept of ‘clipping’.It sees the paths and so it import them, simple.
I’ve written further about this here from a LaserWeb perspective: Clipped (cropped) Inkscape SVG files do not maintain the clipping in LW4 - #5 by easytarget
as @Protopia says, you need to remove (crop/delete) the paths you dont want completely from the image.
I think I found a rather roundabout solution to this paired with another issue (that may not be a mistake) I found with how meerk40t handles images vs rastering vector graphics. Will post when I experience consistency with my experiment.