Crop an image

Cropping versus resizing

Resizing changes how big an image is while keeping everything in the frame. Cropping removes part of the frame entirely. You crop when the composition is wrong, when a platform demands a particular shape, or when you want to cut a detail out of a larger picture. Most real-world jobs need both: crop to the shape you want, then resize to the pixel dimensions the destination expects. The crop tool exports at the cropped region's native resolution, so it is best to crop first and resize second.

Using the ratio lock

Free-form cropping lets you drag any rectangle. Locking a ratio constrains the box so that every drag keeps the same proportions, which is what you want when the output has to fit a fixed slot. The common ones:

• 1:1 for profile pictures, app icons, Instagram grid posts and product tiles.
• 4:5 for Instagram and Facebook portrait posts, which take up the most feed space.
• 16:9 for YouTube thumbnails, presentation slides, video covers and most website banners.
• 3:2 for the classic DSLR frame and most print sizes such as 6×4 and 12×8.
• 9:16 for Stories, Reels, TikTok covers and phone wallpapers.

Once a ratio is locked you can still move the box freely and drag any corner to grow or shrink it; only the shape is fixed.

Getting a clean crop

The preview is rendered from the actual image pixels, so what you see is exactly what you get. A few habits make the result better:

• Leave breathing room around a subject that will be displayed in a circle. Most avatar frames cut off the corners of a square, so keep faces well inside the edges.
• Do not crop a phone photo down to a tiny fragment and expect it to stay sharp. Cropping keeps the original pixel density, so a 300 pixel wide region will always be 300 pixels wide.
• Straighten first if the horizon is tilted. The crop tool does not rotate; use a photo editor for that and then crop here.

Choosing an export format

The export step re-encodes only the cropped area. For photos, JPG or WebP at quality 85 is the sensible default. Choose PNG if the crop contains text, a screenshot or a transparent background, because PNG keeps every pixel exactly as it was. Transparent areas are only preserved when you export to PNG, WebP or GIF; exporting to JPG fills transparency with white.

Because everything runs locally, you can crop a passport photo, an ID scan or a screenshot of a private conversation without that image ever being sent to a server.