About this tool
Cropping keeps the part of a photo you want and throws the rest away. A surprising number of disappointing photos are badly composed rather than badly exposed: someone clipped at the edge of the frame, half the picture given over to empty sky, a desk visible around the document you were photographing. Removing those tidies the image immediately. Centring a face, or squaring off a picture for a profile photo, is the same operation.
Cropping is not the same as resizing. Resizing keeps the whole picture and changes its pixel dimensions; cropping genuinely discards whatever falls outside your selection. The result is smaller than the original and you cannot widen it again afterwards. While you drag, this tool dims the area outside your selection so you can see the result before committing, and Ctrl+Z takes it back if you change your mind. Your image is never uploaded. Editing and saving both happen inside your browser, so you can open files you would not want to hand to a server — photos with faces in them, internal documents, anything sensitive.
How to use
- Click "Pick an image & start" to open a file.
- Select the crop tool and drag out the area you want to keep. Everything outside is dimmed so the result is visible straight away.
- Drag the handles to fine-tune. To reposition the whole selection, grab inside it and move it.
- Press Enter to crop. Ctrl+Z undoes it.
- Save via File > Export.
Frequently asked questions
- Does cropping reduce quality?
- The pixels you keep are untouched — nothing is recalculated, the rest is simply discarded. What does shrink is the pixel count of the result. Crop to a very small region and it will be sharp at that size but will go soft if you then need to display it large.
- Can I get the cropped-away area back?
- While you are still working, Ctrl+Z restores it. Once you have saved the cropped file, the discarded area is gone. Keep the original and crop a copy.
- How do I crop to an exact square?
- Drag out a rough selection and then set its width and height to the same number. Profile pictures are usually cropped square and displayed as a circle, so centre the face and leave a little room above the head and below the chin — that survives any service cropping it further.
- What does trimming transparent edges do?
- It finds the transparent margin around your image and crops tight to the actual content. Images with the background removed often carry invisible empty space on all sides, which throws off alignment when you place them somewhere else. Trimming fixes that. If there is no transparent area, nothing happens.
- Should I crop or resize first?
- Crop first. Resizing first throws away pixels you are about to crop away anyway. Decide the composition, then scale the result to the size you need.
- Can I crop several photos identically?
- If they were shot from a fixed position, note the coordinates and size of the first selection and reuse those values. Handheld shots drift slightly between frames, so the same coordinates will not always land correctly — check each one.
- Should I decide an aspect ratio before cropping?
- If the destination is known, yes. Common targets are square (1:1), widescreen content (16:9), and print sizes (4:3, 3:2). Changing the ratio after cropping means cropping again, and each pass leaves you less to work with.
- I photographed a document and want just the paper.
- Crop to the paper edges. If the shot was taken at an angle so the page looks like a trapezoid, cropping alone will not square it up — rotate to correct the tilt first, then crop.