Crop Image

Cropping Throws Pixels Away on Purpose

A crop exists to discard part of the frame, which is why it's worth spending a minute on the selection box before you press the button. Anything outside it can't be recovered from the file you download.

Moving the selection

The four corner handles resize the box, and dragging inside it moves the whole thing. The canvas listens for pointer events, so a finger on a phone works exactly like a mouse, and if your drag wanders off the edge it keeps its grip instead of dropping the handle mid-gesture.

If you'd 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 straight away. That's useful if you work from the keyboard alone, or if you need the selection at an exact pixel offset and not just roughly in place. Every value is clamped to the image bounds, so the box can't escape the frame or invert itself.

Four ratios, and no more

You get Free, 1:1, 16:9 and 4:3. Picking one re-centres a box that fits it, and after that, dragging any corner keeps the shape. An older version of this page advertised 9:16 and 2:1 as well, but 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, as long as the source is tall enough to supply them.

A faint rule-of-thirds grid sits over the selection while you work. Putting a horizon or an eye line near one of those lines is a good habit, though it's a convention and you're free to ignore it.

Resolution is the real budget

Crop hard enough and you run out of pixels. Take a square out of one quarter of a 12-megapixel photo and you're left with roughly 3 megapixels. That's comfortable on a screen but thin for a print at any size. The source dimensions are shown under the number fields, so check them before you decide how tight to go. If the result then has to meet a specific size, scale it afterwards with Resize Image instead of 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. The format follows the source file unless you choose otherwise, and if you pick JPEG for an image with transparency, it'll ask which colour should sit behind the transparent areas.

Camera metadata doesn't come along with the crop, because the file is rebuilt from decoded pixels.

Rotation needs a separate mention. The crop works on the image exactly as your browser decodes and displays it, so the region you see in the preview is the region you cut. If a photo looks upright in one program and sideways in another, the disagreement is in the EXIF orientation tag, not the pixels. Image Metadata Viewer will tell you what that tag actually says before you start guessing.