Image Cropper

What cropping is for

Cropping removes the outer parts of a picture to improve the composition, remove distractions or match a required shape. It changes the picture's framing without changing the pixels that remain, so nothing is blurred or stretched. Typical uses are cutting out people or objects at the edge, making a square profile picture from a wide photo, matching the aspect ratio a website or a printer expects, and focusing on the subject.

The cropper here is a visual one: your picture appears with a bright rectangle over it, and everything outside the rectangle is dimmed. Drag the rectangle to move it, drag the handles on the corners and sides to resize it, and see exactly what will be kept.

Aspect ratio presets

Locking the aspect ratio keeps the crop rectangle in the proportions you need while you resize it. Common choices are:

• 1:1 (square): profile pictures, Instagram grid posts and product thumbnails.
• 4:5: the portrait format for Instagram feed posts.
• 4:3 and 3:2: standard photo and camera proportions, and the shapes of most prints.
• 16:9: video, YouTube thumbnails, slide decks and desktop wallpapers.
• 9:16: phone screens, Stories and Reels.
• Original: keeps the picture's own proportions while you crop tighter.
• Free: any shape you like.

Precision and keyboard control

Below the picture there are four number boxes: left, top, width and height in pixels. Use them when you need an exact area, for example to crop a 600 by 600 pixel square starting at a specific point. They stay in sync with the rectangle. With the crop area selected, the arrow keys move it by one pixel, and Shift with an arrow moves it by ten, which is handy for fine adjustments on a touch-free desktop.

On phones and tablets the corner handles are enlarged for finger use, and dragging works with touch. If the picture is very large, the preview is scaled to fit your screen, but the crop is applied to the full-resolution original, so you do not lose quality.

Cropping for print sizes

Prints come in fixed proportions, and a photo that does not match will be trimmed automatically by the printer, sometimes cutting off heads or edges. A 4 by 6 inch print is 3:2, 5 by 7 is 7:5, 8 by 10 is 5:4 and A4 paper is about 1:1.41. Set the crop to the ratio you need, position the rectangle yourself, and you decide what is lost.

Also check the resolution: for a good print at 300 dpi, a 4 by 6 inch picture needs about 1,200 by 1,800 pixels. If your crop is much smaller than that, the print may look soft.

Save in the right format

You can save the result as PNG, JPG or WebP. Choose PNG when the picture is a screenshot or graphic and you want no quality loss; choose JPG for photographs to keep the file small; choose WebP for small files with transparency support. The default follows the format of the original. The quality slider appears for JPG and WebP, and around 90 percent is a good balance.

Crop first, then resize. Cropping decides what stays in the frame; the Image Resizer then sets the final pixel size. If the file is still too big, use the Image Compressor. Read JPG vs PNG vs WebP for help choosing a format.

Composition tips

A tighter crop usually makes a stronger picture. Try placing the subject off centre, along one of the lines that divide the frame into thirds, and leave a little space in the direction they are facing. Remove anything bright or distracting near the edges. When cropping for a specific size, crop generously enough that you can still trim later. For faces, keep the eyes about a third of the way down from the top.

If a background is the problem rather than the framing, the Background Remover can make a plain background transparent.

Privacy and limits

The image is cropped inside your browser and never uploaded. The crop keeps the original resolution of the selected area, so a small crop from a large photo stays sharp, but cropping a tiny area from a small picture will produce a small image. Animated GIFs are turned into a single frame; crop those in a dedicated animation tool.