Crop Image

Cropping Throws Pixels Away on Purpose

Discarding part of the frame is the entire point of a crop, and it is also why the selection box deserves a minute of attention before you press the button. Whatever falls outside it is not recoverable from the file you download.

Moving the selection

Four corner handles resize the box and a drag inside it moves the whole thing. The canvas listens for pointer events, so a finger on a phone behaves exactly as a mouse does, and a drag that wanders off the edge keeps its grip instead of dropping the handle mid-gesture.

If you would rather not drag at all, the X, Y, Width and Height fields underneath hold the real state. Type 1200 into Width and the box updates immediately. That path matters to two groups: anyone working from the keyboard alone, and anyone who needs a selection at an exact pixel offset rather than an approximate one. Every value is clamped to the image bounds, so the box cannot escape the frame or invert itself.

Four ratios, and no more

Free, 1:1, 16:9 and 4:3. Picking one re-centres a box that satisfies it, and from then on dragging any corner preserves the shape. An older version of this page advertised 9:16 and 2:1 as well; neither ratio was ever in the interface. For a vertical story frame, leave the ratio on Free and type the numbers — 1080 and 1920 into Width and Height will do it, provided the source is tall enough to supply them.

A faint rule-of-thirds grid sits over the selection while you work. Placing a horizon or an eye line near one of those lines is a useful habit, though it remains a convention rather than a rule.

Resolution is the real budget

Crop hard enough and you run out of pixels. Taking a square out of one quarter of a 12-megapixel photo leaves roughly 3 megapixels: comfortable on a screen, thin for a print at any size. The source dimensions are printed under the number fields, so check them before deciding how tight to go. If the result then has to meet a specific size, scale it afterwards with Resize Image rather than pulling the handles further in.

What lands in the download

The export is a fresh encode of the selected region at full source resolution. The preview is scaled to fit your screen, but nothing is ever saved at preview size. Format follows the source file unless you choose otherwise, and selecting JPEG for an image with transparency will ask which colour should sit behind the transparent areas.

Camera metadata does not travel with the crop, because the file is rebuilt from decoded pixels.

Rotation deserves its own note. The crop operates on the image exactly as your browser decodes and displays it, so the region you see in the preview is the region you cut. When a photo appears upright in one program and sideways in another, that disagreement lives in the EXIF orientation tag rather than in the pixels, and Image Metadata Viewer will tell you what that tag actually says before you start guessing.