Crop an image

The ratio menu covers the shapes most destinations ask for. 1:1 is the square used for profile pictures, shop thumbnails and album art. 16:9 matches widescreen video, YouTube thumbnails (1280 × 720) and presentation slides. 4:3 is the shape of most phone and compact-camera sensors, and 3:2 is the native shape of most DSLR and mirrorless cameras and of 6 × 4 inch prints. Free lets you draw any rectangle, which suits screenshots where you only want one window or one paragraph.

With a fixed ratio the frame keeps its shape while you drag a corner, so you can resize it and move it over the subject without the proportions drifting. For a portrait shape the menu does not list, such as 4:5 for an Instagram post (1080 × 1350), use Free and check the pixel size the editor reports once you apply the crop.

Cropping removes pixels; it never resamples the ones you keep. Cut a 4032 × 3024 phone photo (12 megapixels) to a centred square and you get 3024 × 3024, about 9 megapixels, with every remaining pixel as sharp as before. Fewer pixels also means a smaller file, so trimming the empty sky above a group shot is an easy first step when a photo is slightly over an upload limit. The export quality setting decides the rest.

What a crop cannot do is add detail. A tight crop of a distant face leaves you with a small image, and stretching it back up to fill a large frame will look soft. If a site needs an exact size such as 400 × 400, crop to the right shape here, then set the final width and height with the resize tool.

The Circle option masks the crop into a circle and saves it as a PNG, because PNG is the format that keeps the transparent corners outside the circle. Combine it with the 1:1 ratio to get a true circle rather than an oval. A round PNG works well in email signatures, team pages and slide decks, where a square photo with white corners would look out of place. Social networks already display avatars as circles, so for those the square version is enough.

Your browser decodes, crops and re-encodes the image. No copy is sent to a server, nothing is kept after you close the tab, and there is no account to create. That matters for ID scans, screenshots of chats or documents with personal details, where you usually want to keep only part of the picture anyway. The rest of the editor sits in the same panel if you also need to rotate, straighten or adjust brightness before downloading.