Free browser tool
This cropper lets you keep a rectangle of an image and discard everything around it. Drag the frame over the part you want, optionally lock it to a standard ratio, and export the cut — the kept pixels come straight from the original at full resolution.
It suits anyone fighting a layout: getting a face centred in a square avatar, trimming browser chrome out of a screenshot, cutting a 16:9 thumbnail from a vertical photo, or removing a distracting edge before publishing.
The image is decoded and cut entirely inside your browser tab using the Canvas API. There is no upload, so even a sensitive document screenshot can be cropped here without it leaving your computer.
Two limitations to know up front: the cut is always rectangular, and the export is re-encoded, so a JPEG passes through the encoder once more on the way out. Animated GIFs are reduced to their first frame.
Crop · selection tool
Drop an image here
Drag the corners to frame your shot. The image never leaves your browser.
or paste with Ctrl / ⌘ + V
Step by step
Drop a file into the panel, browse for it, or paste an image from your clipboard.
Drag inside the bright area to move it and pull a corner dot to resize it. The thirds grid helps you place the subject.
Pick 1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 or 9:16 and the selection keeps that shape while you drag. Free mode lets you cut anything.
Type exact X, Y, width and height values for pixel-perfect crops, choose the output format, then download the cut.
Practical guide
A crop is an editorial decision before it is a technical one. Here is how to make that decision deliberately, and how to keep the file honest afterwards.
Every photo has a subject and a lot of supporting information. Cropping is how you set the ratio between them. Before dragging anything, name the one thing a viewer should see in the first half second, then cut until that thing dominates the frame.
The most common mistake is a timid crop: trimming a few percent off each edge changes nothing. If a crop is worth doing, it is usually worth doing decisively.
The overlay divides the selection into nine cells. Placing your subject along a line, or at an intersection, produces a composition that feels balanced without being static — a habit borrowed from viewfinder grids.
It is a guide, not a rule. Centred subjects work well for symmetry, portraits and anything that will later be masked into a circle, where off-centre placement gets clipped.
Cropping sets composition and resizing sets file weight, and doing them in that order avoids a common trap: resize first and you may discover the crop you wanted no longer has enough pixels left.
Check the megapixel readout as you drag. A crop that leaves 800 × 600 px is fine for an in-article image and far too small for a full-width banner.
Most platforms crop uploads automatically to fit their grid, and their automatic crop rarely agrees with yours. Cropping to the target ratio yourself is the only way to control what survives.
Where a platform publishes dimensions rather than a ratio, crop to the ratio here and then set the exact pixel size with the resize tool.
Before you export
Honest limits matter more than a longer feature list. These are the trade-offs worth knowing before you download the result.
The exported file contains only the selected rectangle. Keep the original if you might want a different framing later.
PNG gives a lossless cut but a larger file. JPEG and WebP are smaller but pass the pixels through a lossy encoder — stay at 90% or above if the crop will be edited again.
A tight crop of a small image produces a small image. If the result needs to be larger, start from a higher-resolution source rather than enlarging afterwards.
Because the crop is redrawn on a canvas, EXIF, GPS and colour-profile tags are not carried into the output. Use the EXIF tool if you want to remove metadata without re-encoding.
Rounded, circular and freeform shapes need an alpha mask, which is outside this tool's scope. Crop square and apply the shape in CSS or a design tool.
Exporting a transparent PNG crop as JPEG flattens the transparent pixels onto white, because JPEG has no alpha channel.
Questions
Cropping removes area: you keep part of the frame and throw the rest away, so the composition changes and the pixel count drops. Resizing keeps the whole frame but redraws it at a different pixel size. If a photo is the wrong shape for your layout, crop it. If it is the right shape but too heavy, resize it.
The pixels you keep are taken directly from the source at their original resolution, so the kept area is not softened or scaled. The only quality cost comes from re-encoding on export — choose PNG for a truly lossless cut, or keep the JPEG quality at 90% or above.
1:1 for profile pictures and most product grids, 4:5 for portrait-first social feeds, 16:9 for video thumbnails and slide decks, 3:2 for classic photographic prints, and 9:16 for full-screen phone content. When a platform publishes exact dimensions, crop to that ratio first and resize to the pixel size afterwards.
Yes. The width and height fields accept exact numbers and the X and Y fields set the top-left corner, so you can reproduce the same crop across several images. The fields and the draggable frame stay in sync.
The preview scales the image down to fit your window, so one screen pixel may represent several image pixels. The Crop size readout always reports true image pixels, which is what ends up in the exported file.
No. This tool cuts rectangles, because that is what JPEG, PNG and WebP store. A circular avatar on the web is normally a square crop displayed with a rounded CSS mask — crop to 1:1 here and let the site round the corners.
The image you drop in is decoded by your browser and drawn into a canvas in the same tab. The crop is taken from that canvas and saved directly to your device. At no point is the file sent anywhere — you can confirm this by watching the network panel in your browser's developer tools while you crop.
Nothing is cached, logged or retained on our side, because nothing ever reaches us. Refreshing the page clears the image from memory entirely.