Crop an image
Drag the part you want. Keep exactly that.
A small task starts here.
Drop an image here, paste it, or choose from your device.
Up to 30 MB · PNG, JPEG, or WebP · Processed locallyChoose an image and it appears here with a rectangle you can drag.
Result
Choose an image and a rectangle you can drag appears on it.
Crop an image, without the extra steps.
Drag a rectangle over your picture and keep what is inside it. The box starts as the whole frame and reports its size in the picture's own pixels as you move it, so a slot asking for 400 x 400 can be hit exactly rather than approximately. Square, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 and 4:5 each snap the box to the largest rectangle of that shape the picture can hold. A JPEG stays a JPEG; everything else is written as PNG, and a transparent background stays transparent.
How to use this tool
- 1Choose an image and it appears with a rectangle on it.
- 2Drag the edges, or pick a shape, and watch the pixel size.
- 3Download the cropped picture.
When Crop an image is the right tool
- A profile slot wants an exact square and the photo is a tall portrait, so resizing it would squash a face.
- A banner space is 16:9 and the picture it has to come out of is nothing like that shape.
- A screenshot of a whole desktop needs to become a screenshot of one dialog.
- A product photo has a metre of empty floor under it that every listing thumbnail is wasting on.
- A scanned page came out with a black margin down one side that no amount of resizing removes.
- An image is being reused at a smaller size and the important part is in one corner of it.
Cropping and resizing answer different questions
Resizing changes how many pixels a picture has and keeps everything that was in it. Cropping keeps the pixels exactly as they are and throws away the parts outside the rectangle. That is why a square slot is a crop rather than a resize: unlocking a resizer’s ratio does get you 400 by 400, at the cost of a face that is now noticeably wider than it was. If you want both — a particular part of a picture at a particular size — crop first, then resize what comes out.
Why the rectangle cannot leave the picture
Drag an edge to the frame and it stops. Some editors let the box hang off the side and fill the overhang with white or with transparency, which quietly turns a crop into a crop-and-pad. Nothing here invents a pixel: the result is always a rectangle that was genuinely inside the file you opened. The same clamp catches a rectangle carried over from a larger image, and a setting sent by an agent — in both cases the box is pulled back inside and the page says what was actually taken.
A photograph from a phone is stored on its side
Cameras rarely rotate the pixels. They record the sensor’s own frame and add an orientation tag saying which way up it should be shown, and every viewer honours it — which means the picture you draw a rectangle on and the buffer underneath it can be different shapes. The crop is taken from the upright picture on screen, so what you framed is what you get, and the file that comes out is upright with no tag left to be misread by something that ignores it.
What the output file will be
A JPEG comes back as a JPEG, because re-encoding a photograph as PNG routinely produces a file several times larger than the crop it came from. Everything else is written as PNG, which keeps transparency: a logo trimmed to its own edges still has a see-through background rather than a white box around it. The cropped area is drawn from the decoded pixels, so no metadata travels with it — the camera details and any location in the original are not carried over.
A few quick answers.
Choose an image and it appears with a rectangle on it. Drag the edges, or pick a shape, and watch the pixel size. Download the cropped picture.
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Cropping only removes pixels - it never adds any, so the result is always smaller than the original and the rectangle cannot be dragged outside the frame. Photographs stored sideways under an orientation tag are cropped from the upright picture you can see. There is no rotation or straightening here, and one image is cropped at a time.
Yes. The four number fields under the picture are the rectangle itself — width, height, and how far its corner sits from the left and top edges — in the picture’s own pixels. Type 400 into width and height with Square selected and the box is exactly 400 by 400, wherever you then drag it.
Picking Square or 16:9 snaps the box to the largest rectangle of that shape the picture can hold, centred on where the box already was. In a wide, short picture a 16:9 box is limited by the height rather than the width, so it can end up narrower than you expect — that is the biggest one that actually fits.
Almost always, because there are fewer pixels to store. It is not proportional, though: a crop that keeps a quarter of the area of a detailed photograph will usually be more than a quarter of the bytes, since the part you kept is the part with the detail in it.