It cuts a rectangle out of a picture, turns the picture by quarter turns or mirrors it, and saves the result as PNG, JPG or WebP. The picture is opened and processed inside your browser, so a private photo is never uploaded, and a large photo does not wait in any queue.
How to crop
- Drop the image on the box, choose it, or paste a copied image with Ctrl or Cmd and V.
- Pick an aspect ratio, or leave it on Free. The crop box reshapes itself around its centre and never grows when you pick a ratio.
- Drag the box to move it, drag a corner or an edge handle to resize it, and watch the size under the box. With a ratio chosen the shape stays exact while you drag.
- Choose the format and download. The file is named after your original with "-cropped" added.
Dragging works with a mouse, a finger or a pen. For precise work the four number fields give the left edge, the top edge, the width and the height in pixels, and the arrow keys move the box when it has the focus, with Shift and the arrows resizing it. Nothing in the tool needs a pointer.
Which ratio for what
- 1:1 for profile pictures and square posts.
- 4:3 for classic photos, slides and many tablets.
- 16:9 for video, thumbnails and widescreen backgrounds.
- 3:2 for photos from most cameras and for 6 by 4 inch prints.
- 9:16 for vertical stories and short videos.
A worked example: a 4000 by 3000 photo is 4:3. The largest centred 16:9 crop is 4000 by 2250 pixels, starting 375 pixels from the top. The largest centred square is 3000 by 3000, starting 500 pixels from the left. Choose a ratio first, then move the box to the part you want to keep.
Rotate and flip
The buttons turn the picture by 90 degrees to the left or right, and mirror it horizontally or vertically. The crop box travels with the picture, so it keeps covering the same part of it. Mirroring is useful for a selfie that was saved the wrong way round, and turning is useful for a scan that came in sideways. All of it is exact: a quarter turn only moves pixels, it does not blur them.
PNG, JPG or WebP
PNG keeps every pixel and any transparency, which suits graphics and screenshots. JPG is smaller for photographs and has no transparency, so the tool fills it with white. WebP is smaller than both, keeps transparency and is read by every current browser. For JPG and WebP the quality slider trades size for fidelity; around 80 to 92 is a sensible range.
Good to know
Photos that carry an orientation tag, as phone cameras do, are shown upright. The saved file contains only pixels: the location, the camera and the other metadata stored in the original are not copied. A very large picture is limited to about 50 million pixels, because that is what browsers can handle safely.