Crop Image

Cropping an image means keeping a rectangle of it and discarding the rest — usually to straighten a composition, remove something distracting at the edge, or fit a picture into a shape a website demands. Drag a box over the part of the photo you want, pick a shape if you need a particular one, and download the result. The crop is exact: the pixels inside your box are copied at their original size, so nothing is stretched, squashed or scaled. Everything happens in your browser, so the photo is never uploaded — which matters more for pictures than for most files, because a photo often carries the place it was taken inside it.

How to use it

1. Drop a photo in, or browse for one. Nothing is sent anywhere.
2. Drag a box over the part you want to keep. Everything outside it is dimmed so you can see the result before committing.
3. Choose a shape if you need one — square for an avatar, 16:9 for a banner, 9:16 for a story. Free-form keeps whatever you drew.
4. The readout shows the exact pixel size, the ratio, and how much of the original survives.
5. Download. JPEG in, JPEG out; PNG in, PNG out — the format is never switched behind your back.

Examples

• A square avatar taken out of a wide holiday photo.
• A 16:9 banner cropped from a portrait shot.
• Trimming a stranger out of the edge of a family picture.

Frequently asked questions

How do I crop a photo to a square?

Choose the Square 1:1 shape above the picture, then drag a box wherever you want it — the selection stays square however you drag. Square is what most profile pictures want, because a circular avatar is a square image with the corners masked off by the site showing it. If your subject is near an edge, drag the box over them rather than accepting the centred default: a face cropped to the middle of a wide photo is often a face cropped out of it.

Does cropping reduce the quality of my image?

The pixels you keep are not resized, so nothing is blurred or stretched — but a JPEG is re-encoded when it is saved, and JPEG encoding always loses a little. At the quality used here the difference is not visible in a single pass; cropping the same file over and over would eventually show. PNG and WebP behave differently: PNG is lossless, so a cropped PNG is pixel-identical inside the box. If you plan several edits, do them in one session rather than saving and reopening between each.

What size should a profile picture be?

Square, and larger than the space it will be shown in. Most platforms display avatars somewhere between 100 and 400 pixels but store something bigger, so a square around 800 x 800 is comfortably enough for any of them and still a small file. The important part is the shape rather than the exact number: uploading a rectangle to a service that wants a square means the service crops it for you, usually to the centre, which is how people end up with an avatar of their own shoulder.

Is the cropped-out part really gone?

Yes. The kept rectangle is drawn into a new image of exactly that size, and the file you download contains only those pixels — there is no hidden original inside it and no way to drag the edges back out. This is worth knowing because some editors do the opposite: they store the crop as an instruction alongside the full picture so it can be undone later, which means the part you removed is still in the file you send someone. If you need the original back, keep your own copy before cropping.

Is my photo uploaded anywhere?

No. The picture is opened, cropped and saved entirely inside your browser on your own device, and nothing is transmitted or stored. You can load this page, disconnect from the internet, and it still works. There is a side effect worth knowing: because the crop is written out fresh, the EXIF data from the original — which can include the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken — does not survive into the cropped copy. That is a consequence of how saving works rather than a promise we are making, so if removing that data is the actual goal, use the metadata remover, which is built for it and tested against it.