Crop Image

How to crop an image

1. Add a photoDrop it on the box, tap Choose photo, or paste a screenshot. JPEG, PNG and WebP files open here, one photo at a time; Replace swaps it for a different one without touching your settings.
2. Pick a shapeTap a ratio such as 1:1 or 16:9 and the frame jumps to the largest rectangle of that shape, centred on the photo. Free lets you pull the frame into any rectangle you like.
3. Place the frameDrag inside the frame to move it, or pull any of its four corners and four edges. The size shows live while you drag. With a keyboard, focus the frame and use the arrow keys: 10 pixels per press, 100 with Shift.
4. Type exact pixels if you need themWidth and Height count pixels of the original photo. With the link button on, changing one number updates the other so the shape holds.
5. DownloadChoose Same, JPEG, PNG or WebP. The new file keeps the original name plus its size, so a crop of beach.jpg might be saved as beach-1080x1350.jpg.

Cropping is not resizing

Cropping cuts away the edges of a picture; resizing redraws the whole picture with fewer or more pixels. This tool only crops. Every pixel inside the frame is copied one to one, so a 1080 × 1080 frame placed on a 4032 × 3024 photo gives you exactly 1080 × 1080 pixels showing a small part of the scene, not the whole scene squeezed into a square.

If you want the whole scene at a smaller size, do it in two steps: crop to the shape you need with the frame as large as it will go, then shrink the result with the Image Compressor & Resizer. Keeping the two jobs apart means the numbers you type here always tell you exactly which pixels you keep, and nothing is softened by scaling. A size larger than the photo is capped instead of enlarged, because enlarging cannot add detail that was never captured.

Which aspect ratio for which job

An aspect ratio is simply width compared with height. Most places that display photos fit them into a fixed shape, trimming whatever sticks out. Cropping to that shape yourself means you decide what is left out instead of an automatic centre crop. The last column shows the largest frame each preset gives on a typical 12-megapixel phone photo of 4,032 × 3,024 pixels.

Original keeps the photo's own proportions, which is handy when you only want to trim a distracting strip from one side without changing the shape. Free has no fixed shape at all; switch the link button on while in Free and whatever shape the frame has at that moment is held while you resize. For how to work out a ratio yourself and why print sizes trim photos, see the aspect ratio guide.

Where to put the frame

The two faint lines in each direction split the frame into nine equal parts. They are a guide, not a rule, but a few habits make most crops look deliberate:

• Keep the horizon off the middle. Line it up with the upper third line to give the ground or water more room, or the lower line when the sky is the interesting part.
• Put the subject near a crossing. For a portrait, place the nearer eye close to where the top third line meets a vertical one, rather than dead centre.
• Leave a little headroom. Keep a gap above the head of roughly a tenth of the frame height; a head touching the top edge looks cramped, while a large empty band above it looks lost.
• Don't cut at joints. Crop through the middle of a thigh or upper arm instead of at a knee, elbow, wrist or ankle, where a limb looks chopped off.
• Give movement somewhere to go. A person looking or walking sideways needs more space in front of them than behind, so move the frame toward the direction they face.
• Check all four edges. A stray elbow, half a car or a bright sign poking in at the border pulls the eye away. Nudge that edge inward until it is gone.

If the picture will later be shown as a circle, keep the face within the middle of the square: a circle drawn inside a square covers π/4 of it, so about 21% of the area, all in the corners, disappears.

Why the pixel count after cropping matters

Every crop throws pixels away, and what remains has to be enough for where the picture is going. Cutting the middle half out of a 4032 × 3024 photo in both directions leaves 2016 × 1512 pixels: about 3 megapixels, a quarter of the original. Cropping a single face out of a group photo can leave only a few hundred pixels across.

Compare the numbers in the Width and Height boxes with the destination before you download. If a feed shows posts 1080 pixels wide and your crop is 600 pixels wide, it has to be enlarged 1.8 times and will look soft. A desktop wallpaper for a 1920 × 1080 screen wants a crop at least that large; a 16:9 frame taken from the full width of the photo above is 4032 × 2268, plenty. For prints, the image size guide lists the pixels needed for each paper size.

The boxes always show the true size of the crop, so you can watch the number while you drag. If it is too small, widen the frame or go back to a larger original; an image that has already been shrunk once cannot get its detail back.

Choosing the output format

Same keeps a JPEG a JPEG, a PNG a PNG and a WebP a WebP, which is the right choice most of the time. JPEG and WebP copies are saved at quality 0.92 on the 0 to 1 scale browsers use: high enough that one crop shows no visible loss, and fixed so there is one less setting to think about. PNG is lossless and loses nothing at all, but a photo saved as PNG is typically several times larger than the same photo as JPEG.

JPEG cannot store transparency. If you save a PNG or WebP that has see-through areas as JPEG, those areas are filled with white, and the hint under Save as warns you when that applies. Pick PNG or WebP to keep them transparent. If the cropped file is still too heavy for an upload form, run it through the compressor afterwards; the format comparison guide explains the trade-offs in more depth.

Rotation, orientation and hidden data

Phones often store a photo sideways together with an orientation tag that tells viewers which way to turn it. The crop is made on the photo the way your browser shows it, with that turn already applied, so what you frame is what you get, and the saved copy is upright without needing the tag.

Because the copy is drawn fresh from pixels, it carries none of the original's EXIF block: no GPS position, capture time or camera model comes along. That makes cropping a reasonable last step before sharing, but the original file on your device still holds everything. Open it in the EXIF Viewer to see exactly what that is.

What this cropper does not do

• No rotating or straightening. A tilted horizon has to be levelled in a photo editor; the frame here always sits square to the picture.
• No circles or freeform shapes. The output is always a rectangle, with every pixel inside it kept.
• No scaling up or down. The file holds exactly the pixels inside the frame. Shrink it afterwards if you need a smaller file.
• One photo at a time, in JPEG, PNG or WebP. GIF, AVIF and HEIC files are turned away with a short note on what to convert them to.
• Browser limits on very large crops. Browsers cap the size of the drawing surface used to save a crop, and phones usually set a lower cap than computers. If a crop is over the limit you get a clear error rather than a blank file; shrink the photo first and crop the smaller copy.