Secure server conversion
Crop Image
Trim an image down to the part that matters. Drag across the preview to choose the area to keep, lock it to a common ratio if you need one, and download. It is free and needs no account.
Drag & drop your image here
Up to 20 MB per file
× → ×
Drag the selection to move it, drag a corner to resize it, or drag across the image to draw a new one.
Selection: × px
Step by step
How to crop an image in 4 steps
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Add your image
Drag it in or click to browse.
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Choose a ratio
Choose a ratio first if you need one — square for a profile picture, 16:9 for a video thumbnail. Leave it on Free to crop to anything.
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Drag across the preview
Drag across the preview to draw the area you want to keep. The selection size in real pixels is shown underneath.
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Apply and download
Your original file is untouched.
Good to know
Cropping and composition
Cropping is the one edit on this site that genuinely costs nothing. It removes pixels rather than altering them: every pixel you keep is bit-for-bit identical to the original. There is no resampling, no interpolation and no quality trade-off to weigh.
What cropping is really about is composition and aspect ratio, and the ratio is where most practical problems come from.
Aspect ratio is the relationship between width and height — 1:1 for a square, 16:9 for a widescreen video, 4:3 for a classic photo. It matters because platforms crop for you if you do not crop for yourself, and they do it mechanically:
- A profile picture forced into a circle or square will cut whatever falls outside it, usually from the sides.
- A link preview trimmed to 1.91:1 will take a band from the middle and discard the top and bottom.
- A video thumbnail padded to 16:9 gets black bars, or gets cropped — depending on the platform.
Cropping deliberately means you decide what survives, rather than an algorithm deciding for you. That is the entire value of doing it yourself.
Cropping versus resizing
They are often confused but do different things. Cropping changes which part of the picture you keep and removes the rest. Resizing keeps the whole picture and changes how many pixels it is drawn with.
If an image is the right content but the wrong dimensions, you want resize. If it is the wrong shape, or has too much empty space around the subject, you want crop. Frequently you want both: crop to the right ratio first, then resize to the exact pixel dimensions a platform asks for.
Quality
Keeping the result sharp
Because cropping removes pixels rather than changing them, there is nothing to tune and no quality setting on this page.
Two practical consequences worth knowing:
- Cropping reduces resolution. Keeping a quarter of a 4000×3000 photo leaves you 2000×1500 — still large, but if you then need to display it at the original size you are effectively enlarging, which softens it. Crop from the biggest original you have.
- A heavy crop on an already-small image runs out quickly. Cropping a 800px image down to a small detail can leave you with a couple of hundred pixels, which will look soft anywhere it is displayed larger.
The one unavoidable cost is re-encoding. Saving a JPG means a fresh round of JPEG compression; this tool uses a high quality setting so a single crop is invisible, but it is not literally free. PNG and WebP store the result losslessly, so for those the crop really does cost nothing at all.
The output keeps the format you started with, so a PNG stays a PNG with transparency intact.
Common reasons to crop
- Profile pictures. Most platforms want a square and will centre-crop anything else — which is how people end up with the top of their head missing.
- Removing distractions at the edges of a photo: a stray hand, a bin, a bright patch of sky pulling the eye away from the subject.
- Straightening the composition by trimming asymmetrically, so the subject sits where you want it in the frame.
- Extracting a detail — one product from a shelf, one face from a group, one chart from a screenshot of a whole page.
- Removing sensitive information at the edge of a screenshot, such as a name, an email address or a browser tab. Cropping genuinely removes those pixels, unlike drawing a black box over them, which leaves the data underneath in some formats.
- Matching a required ratio before uploading somewhere that would otherwise crop it for you.
Choosing a ratio
The presets cover the ratios that come up most often:
- 1:1 — profile pictures, avatars, most social feed posts.
- 4:3 — the classic photograph and slide shape; still what most cameras and many documents expect.
- 3:2 — the 35mm film ratio, used by most DSLR and mirrorless cameras, and what standard print sizes like 6×4 assume.
- 16:9 — video thumbnails, presentation slides, banner images.
- Free — when the content decides the shape rather than a platform.
Lock the ratio before you drag rather than after. With a ratio selected the selection keeps its proportions as you draw, so you cannot accidentally end up one pixel off square.
Cropping for a printed size
Print sizes are ratios in disguise. A 6×4 print is 3:2; a 7×5 is 7:5; an 8×10 is 4:5. If you send a photo whose ratio does not match, the lab will crop it — and their crop is centred, which is rarely where you would have chosen.
Crop to the print ratio yourself first, then let the lab handle only the scaling. Give them every pixel you have: unlike screen use, printing genuinely benefits from more resolution.
Why this page does not also rotate
Deliberate. The crop rectangle is drawn on the preview and mapped back to real image coordinates, and rotating that preview would put the two out of step — you would select one region and get another. If your image needs turning as well, use rotate first, download, then crop the result.
Privacy
What happens to your file
This tool runs on our server, so it works the same on every phone and computer. Your file is uploaded, and this is exactly what happens to it:
- Stored outside the public web root under a random name, never under your file's name.
- Processed, with the original upload deleted immediately — whether it succeeded or failed.
- The result sits behind a signed link that only you receive, which stops working after 20 minutes, and the file is deleted the moment you download it.
- Anything never collected is deleted automatically within 30 minutes.
- The image itself is never logged or kept. If a conversion fails, we record the formats involved and the error — not the file.
- Camera metadata, including any GPS coordinates recording where a photo was taken, is removed from the result. Only the rotation needed to show the image the right way up is kept.
Questions & answers
Crop Image: frequently asked questions
Does cropping reduce image quality?
The crop itself does not — it removes pixels rather than altering them, so every pixel you keep is identical to the original. Saving does mean re-encoding, so a JPG goes through one more round of compression, which is invisible at the quality used here. PNG and WebP save losslessly.
How do I crop to an exact square for a profile picture?
Select the "Square 1:1" ratio before dragging. The selection then keeps its proportions as you draw, so it cannot come out slightly off. The selection size in real pixels is shown underneath the preview.
What is the difference between cropping and resizing?
Cropping changes which part of the picture you keep and discards the rest. Resizing keeps the whole picture and changes how many pixels it is drawn with. Wrong shape means crop; wrong dimensions means resize. Often you want to crop to the right ratio first, then resize to exact pixels.
Can I crop and rotate on the same page?
Not here, and that is deliberate. The crop rectangle is mapped from the preview back to real image coordinates, and rotating the preview would put those out of step — you would select one region and get another. Rotate first, download, then crop the result.
Is cropping a safe way to remove private information?
Yes — cropping genuinely deletes those pixels, so they are not recoverable from the saved file. That makes it safer than drawing a black box over something, which in some formats leaves the original content underneath. Make sure the detail falls entirely outside your selection.
Is my image uploaded to crop it?
Yes. The edit is applied on our server so that it works the same on every device. Your upload is deleted the moment the edited image is made, the edited image is deleted as soon as you download it, and no one looks at your images.
Keep going
Related image tools
Resize Image
Change an image to any pixel size. Keep the proportions or set both dimensions, with presets for social media. Free, no sign-up.
Rotate Image
Turn a photo the right way up. Rotate in 90° steps, flip if needed, and download. Free, no sign-up, on any phone or computer.
Passport Photo Resizer
Crop and resize a photo to official passport and ID dimensions. Presets for UK, US, Schengen, India, Canada and Australia.
Compress JPG
Make JPG photos smaller, free and with no sign-up. Adjust the quality, see the saving for each photo, and download.