Split-Desktop accepts both digital still and video images for analysis. There must be a mechanism (software and/or hardware) for downloading digital or video camera images onto the computer: for digital camera images only camera software is required and for video camera images a framegrabber board is required. For higher resolution images and ease of image download, a digital camera is recommended.

The first step is for the user to acquire images in the field and download these images onto the computer. Split-Desktop then assists the user in properly scaling the images. Next, the fragments in each of the images are delineated automatically and the size distribution of the rock fragments is determined.

Split-Desktop allows the resulting size distributions to be plotted in various forms (linear-linear, log-linear, log-log, and Rosin-Rammler). The size distribution results can also be stored in a tab-delineated file for access in separate spreadsheet and plotting programs. In addition, Split-Desktop automatically generates results reports in HTML.