Crop images online

What this tool does

Most photos contain something you would rather not send along with them. A stranger at the edge of the frame. A parked car with a readable plate. The corner of a room that is nobody's business.

Cropping is the fix, and cropping is subtraction. Everything outside the box is gone from the file you download, which is usually the point, but it does mean the crop cannot be undone on that copy. Your original file on disk is never modified, which is the whole of the undo button.

Drop in one JPEG, PNG, or WebP, or a whole batch. The active image fills a preview stage with a crop box on top. Drag the box to move it, pull any of the eight handles to resize it, or type numbers straight into the X, Y, Width, and Height fields. A live W × H readout shows the crop in source pixels the whole time.

The box is held inside the image and will not shrink below 16 pixels on a side, so it cannot wander off the frame or collapse to nothing. Mouse, finger, and pen all work, and arrow keys nudge a focused box one pixel at a time, ten with Shift held.

Ratios and exact pixels

The preset row snaps the crop to a fixed shape. 1:1 for a profile picture, 16:9 for a banner, 4:3 and 3:2 for the classic photo shapes, and 3:4, 2:3, and 9:16 for their portrait versions. Original keeps the image's own proportions. Free lets you drag whatever shape you want.

Choosing a preset fits the largest box of that shape the image allows, centered on where your crop already sits, and the handles then hold that ratio while you resize.

When you need a specific number, an avatar at exactly 1080 × 1080, type it in. The box follows, clamped to what the image can actually supply. It will not hand you 1080 pixels out of an 800-pixel photo.

What the export does to your pixels

The crop is drawn at full source resolution. Only the stage preview is scaled to fit your screen, never the output, so a crop taken out of a 24-megapixel photo comes back at the pixel size the readout named.

Every export is re-encoded. No path here copies the original bytes through untouched, because the image is being rebuilt at a new size. Each image keeps its own format: JPEG stays JPEG, PNG stays PNG, WebP stays WebP.

For PNG that costs nothing, because PNG is lossless. For JPEG and WebP it means one more lossy pass at a high quality setting. A single pass is hard to tell from the original, but it is not the same file, and cropping the same JPEG over and over, saving each time, will eventually show.

Re-encoding also drops the hidden EXIF and GPS metadata, which for a photo you are about to post counts as a bonus rather than a loss.

Rotating, straightening, and flipping are out of scope here; Photo Editor does those. AVIF and GIF are not accepted either: dependable in-browser AVIF encoding is still missing on some platforms, and cropping a GIF would flatten its animation.

None of this leaves the page

Nothing is uploaded.

Decoding, cropping, and re-encoding all run in your browser, using code served only from this site. No third-party CDN is involved and there is no account to create.

Exactly one file is fetched beyond the page's own code, and only on demand: JSZip, roughly 97 KB, at the moment you click "Download all (ZIP)" on a multi-image batch. Everything else has already arrived by the time you drop a file in, so you can load this page, disconnect from the network, and go on cropping and downloading single images.

If you would rather check than take that on faith, open DevTools on the Network tab and work through a crop. No image data leaves the machine.

The full source is public on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license, and the privacy page spells out that one fetch and its timing.

Questions

Related tools

Resize Image | scale the whole frame instead of trimming its edges. Compress images | reduce file size without changing dimensions. Convert Image | move between JPEG, PNG, WebP, and AVIF. Photo Editor | rotate, redact, add text, and batch-edit.