Crop an Image Online

What is an image cropper?

An image cropper cuts a rectangular selection out of a photo and discards everything outside it, leaving just the part you wanted — a face pulled out of a group shot, a product isolated from its background, a screenshot trimmed down to the relevant window. This one runs as a browser-based image cropper: you drop or choose a JPEG, PNG or WebP file, draw the crop on a live preview, and download the result.

The file is decoded and re-encoded on your own machine, not on a server. There is nothing to upload, nothing to wait on, and nothing kept once you close the tab.

How to crop an image

1. Add your image and draw a selection. Drop a JPEG, PNG or WebP file onto the page, or click to choose one from your device. Drag anywhere on the preview to draw a crop rectangle, then drag inside that rectangle to move it without resizing it.
2. Set the exact shape you want. Click one of the aspect ratio buttons — Free, 1:1, 4:3, 3:2 or 16:9 — to constrain the selection, or type exact pixel values into the X, Y, Width and Height boxes for a precise crop.
3. Choose a format and download. Pick JPEG, PNG or WebP as the output format, adjust the quality slider if you chose JPEG or WebP (PNG skips it, since PNG is lossless), then press Download to save the cropped file. Reset starts over from the original image.

What cropping does and does not change

The crop itself is geometrically exact. Every pixel inside your selection is kept at its original resolution — cropping never scales, resamples or blurs anything, it only removes what falls outside the rectangle you drew.

Saving the result is a separate step, and it is not free for every format. Because a canvas can only export a fresh image, saving as JPEG means the cropped pixels are decoded and re-encoded, which costs a small amount of quality even though the crop itself lost nothing. PNG is lossless, so a PNG crop is exact all the way through. A dedicated command-line tool can crop a JPEG losslessly by rearranging its blocks; a browser canvas has no way to do that, so treat the JPEG output here as very close, not bit-identical, to a lossless crop.

All metadata is dropped along the way. Re-encoding through canvas strips EXIF data, GPS coordinates, camera model and timestamps — a real loss if you wanted the camera details back, and a real privacy gain if you did not want a photo’s location attached to it. The browser does still read the EXIF orientation flag while decoding, so a phone photo that looks upright in your gallery stays upright here rather than landing on its side.

An aspect ratio button fits the ratio inside your image rather than forcing it. Asking for 16:9 on a tall, narrow photo gives you the widest 16:9 rectangle that actually fits, and the X, Y, Width and Height boxes update to show what you really got. The selection itself is bounded the same way: it can never extend past the edge of the image or shrink below one pixel, and if you drag past the edge, the corner you started from stays pinned where you put it instead of the whole rectangle sliding inward.

There is a ceiling of 16,777,216 output pixels (4096 × 4096), the same one used across the site’s other image tools. A crop is always smaller than the image you started with, so in practice this never comes up here.

Common crop ratios and when to use them

1:1 makes a square, which is what most profile pictures, avatars and square social posts expect. 4:3 is a standard photo and thumbnail ratio going back to older monitors. 3:2 is the native sensor ratio on most DSLR and mirrorless cameras, and matches a standard 4×6 print. 16:9 is the widescreen ratio behind video thumbnails, players and most modern displays. Free skips all of that and lets you draw any rectangle, which is what banners, headers and irregular crops need.

Why is it free?

Cropping happens entirely on your device using canvas, not on a server, so there is no upload to pay for and no processing time to bill you for. That is what makes it possible to offer with no account, no sign-up, no watermark and no limit on how many images you crop.