Image cropper
A good photo with a bad edge, or a site that wants a square when your picture isn’t one. Drop the file here, drag the frame around the part you want and save it. Your browser does the cutting, so nothing is uploaded.
The picture is opened and cut by your own browser. It isn’t uploaded, and it’s gone when you close the page.
What cropping does to the pixels
A picture is a grid. Cropping keeps a rectangle of that grid and drops the rest, so the file gets smaller and the subject gets bigger in whatever space the picture ends up in. Nothing inside the frame changes. A 1200 pixel wide frame cut from a 4000 pixel photo is still the original 1200 pixels, as sharp as they were.
Resizing is a different job. It keeps the whole frame and redraws it on a smaller grid. This page lets you do both in one go. The frame decides what you keep, and “Final width” decides how many pixels you keep it in. Leave that field empty and you get the frame at its real size.
Going the other way doesn’t work. If you ask for a final width larger than the frame, the browser makes up the missing pixels by blending neighbors, and the picture goes soft. Crop wide enough to begin with.
Which shape goes where
Most places that show your picture have already decided on its shape. Give them another one and they’ll crop it for you, usually through the middle of someone’s forehead. If you pick the shape yourself, you decide what gets cut.
| Shape | Where it fits | A good size |
|---|---|---|
| 1:1 | Profile pictures, product thumbnails, square posts. | 1080 × 1080 |
| 4:5 | Portrait posts in a feed. The tallest shape most feeds show without trimming. | 1080 × 1350 |
| 16:9 | Video thumbnails, slides, wide hero images. | 1920 × 1080 |
| 9:16 | Stories and short vertical videos, full phone screen. | 1080 × 1920 |
| 1.91:1 | The card that appears when a link is shared. | 1200 × 630 |
| 3:2 and 4:3 | What cameras and phones shoot. Fine for articles and prints. | 1600 wide |
For the link card, getting the picture right isn’t enough. The page has to announce it too, and the link preview tester shows what each network will draw.
What happens to your file here
- Your browser decodes the picture and applies the rotation the camera stored, so a portrait shot shows up standing.
- Turns and mirrors are applied to that picture. They’re exact, because a quarter turn only moves pixels around and doesn’t redraw them.
- You place the frame by dragging it, pulling a corner or an edge, or typing its position and size in pixels. With the frame selected, the arrow keys nudge it one pixel at a time, ten with Shift.
- When you press “Crop it”, the framed area is drawn on a canvas at the final size and encoded in the format you picked.
The new file is built from pixels and nothing else. The original’s EXIF block, GPS position, camera model and embedded thumbnail stay behind. That last one matters more than you’d think. Some programs crop the picture and keep the old thumbnail, which still shows the part you meant to remove.
Picking the format
“Same as the original” is the safe choice when the picture is going back where it came from. Otherwise:
- WebP for anything headed to a website. Noticeably smaller than JPEG at the same look, and it keeps transparency.
- JPEG when the destination is fussy, like an upload form from 2012, a print shop or an email to someone’s work computer. Transparent areas turn white.
- PNG for screenshots, logos and drawings with flat colors. It’s lossless, so a photograph saved as PNG comes out several times heavier.
Quality 85 is a good place to start for JPEG and WebP. If the file has to be as small as possible, or you want AVIF, crop here as PNG and pass the result through the image compressor. That way the picture only gets compressed once.
Questions people ask
Is my picture uploaded when I crop it?
No. Your browser opens, cuts and saves the file on your device. You can load this page, switch off the network and it still works.
Does cropping reduce the quality of a photo?
The crop itself doesn’t touch the pixels you keep. Saving as JPEG or WebP compresses them again, which costs a little each time, so crop from the original and try not to crop the same file over and over. Saving as PNG loses nothing.
How do I crop a picture to an exact size, like 1200 × 630?
Pick the shape that matches (1.91:1 for 1200 × 630), place the frame, then type 1200 in “Final width”. The height follows from the shape. For a size with no matching shape, leave the shape on “Free” and type the frame’s width and height in pixels.
Does the cropped file still contain the location where the photo was taken?
No. Nothing from the original’s metadata is copied over. If you’re about to share a photo uncropped and want to know what it carries, open it in the photo EXIF remover.
Can I crop a transparent PNG and keep the transparency?
Yes, as long as you save as PNG or WebP. JPEG has no transparency, so transparent areas get filled with white.
What happens to an animated GIF?
You get the first frame as a still picture. This page doesn’t cut animations.