Crop Image

Cropping and resizing are often confused because both change the width and height. They solve different problems. A crop decides what is in the picture: it cuts away a cluttered background, straightens a composition around a face, or turns a landscape shot into a square. A resize decides how many pixels the picture has, without changing what it shows. Most jobs that need an exact size need both, and the order matters.

Crop first. The crop picks the frame using every pixel of the original, so you can place the box precisely. Resize afterwards, with the Resize Image tool, to reach the final pixel count. Doing it the other way round means cropping a picture that has already lost detail, and the frame you end up with has fewer pixels than it could have had.

The exception is Custom size (px). When you know the final dimensions, such as a banner slot of a fixed width and height, typing them here gives a box with those exact proportions and a result at that exact pixel size in one step, as long as the original is large enough to contain it.

Keep an eye on how much is left. Every crop throws pixels away, and a tight crop on a small photo can leave too few for the size you need later. If the box covers only a small part of a phone picture, the cropped file may look fine on screen and still print soft. When the subject is far away in the original, it is worth taking the photo again closer up rather than rescuing it with a heavy crop.

An aspect ratio is the shape of the frame, written as width to height. 1:1 is a square, 4:5 is slightly taller than wide, 9:16 is a phone screen held upright, and 16:9 is a widescreen video frame. The ratio says nothing about size: a 1:1 crop can be 400 pixels or 4,000 pixels across. Locking the box to a ratio means you can make it as large as the photo allows and still get the right shape.

The list covers the shapes most sites and printers use: Free for any rectangle, 1:1 square, 4:5, 3:4 and 2:3 portrait, 16:9 widescreen, 9:16 vertical, and 4:3 and 3:2 landscape. 3:2 is the shape of a classic 4 × 6 inch print and of many camera sensors, and 4:3 is the default photo shape on many phones. Cropping to the shape a site expects means it will not crop the picture for you, often in a worse place.

Choosing the shape before you frame also helps with composition. A tall 4:5 or 9:16 box suits a single person or an object standing upright, and leaves room above the head. A wide 16:9 box suits a group, a landscape or a desk setup. If the subject sits off to one side in the original, a ratio crop is the moment to move it toward a third of the frame, which usually looks more balanced than dead center.

A few of the shapes platforms publish on their own help pages:

Set Shape to Circle and the tool cuts a round picture from the crop box. Pair it with the 1:1 ratio so the circle is a true circle rather than an oval. The area outside the circle becomes the four corners of a square file, because every image file is rectangular; what you see as a circle is a square with see-through or filled corners.

The circle is cut from the box exactly as you placed it, so the same handles apply: drag inside to move, pull an edge or corner to change the size. A 1:1 box with Circle selected gives a perfect round; any other ratio gives an ellipse, which is occasionally what a badge or sticker design calls for.

Outside the circle decides what those corners hold. Transparent is the default and is what you want for a logo or avatar that will sit on a colored page. White and black are there for documents and print, and Custom color takes any hex value so the corners blend into a known background. Many sites already show profile pictures in a circle, in which case a plain square crop is enough and the round cut adds nothing.

For a round avatar, leave a little space between the top of the head and the edge of the circle, and keep the eyes roughly in the upper half. Faces cut off at the forehead look cramped once the site adds its own border. Because the picture will usually be shown small, a crop that fills most of the circle with the face reads better than a wide shot where the face is a small spot in the middle.

Screenshots, scans and images exported from slides often come with a frame of plain white, black or transparent pixels around the real content. Auto-trim borders finds that frame and removes it before the crop is applied. Trim tolerance sets how different a pixel may be from the edge color and still count as border; the default of 10% handles clean screenshots, and raising it helps with scans whose paper is not perfectly even. Keep it low if the picture itself has a plain light area near the edge, or that area may be trimmed too.

Start position decides where the box sits before you touch it, and where it lands on every file in a batch: the center, any of the four sides or four corners, or Smart (subject), which looks for the main subject. For a single picture, drag the box into place yourself. For a batch of similar shots, such as product photos taken on the same stand, pick the position that suits all of them and let the tool repeat it.

Output can stay in the original format with Same as input, or switch to JPG, PNG, WebP or AVIF. A crop is a good moment to change format when a site rejects the source: a HEIC photo from an iPhone can come out as a JPG in the same step, without a separate visit to the image converter. Quality applies to JPG, WebP and AVIF and starts at 85.

Auto orient is on by default and turns phone photos upright using the camera's orientation tag before cropping, so the box you see matches the result. Strip metadata removes GPS position and camera details from the cropped file. When the crop is for a passport, visa or ID application, use the passport photo maker instead: it sets the exact size for the document and shows head-position guides. If a cropped picture is still too heavy for an upload form, run it through the Compress Image tool.