Crop an image to any shape or aspect ratio

Cropping cuts away part of the frame and keeps the remaining pixels exactly as they were. Resizing keeps the whole frame and changes how many pixels describe it. If a photo has a bin in the corner, cropping removes the bin; resizing just gives you a smaller bin. Both make the file lighter, but only one changes what the picture is of. When a form asks for a square image, cropping is almost always the right answer — squashing a rectangle into a square distorts every face in it.

The pixels you keep are untouched by the crop itself — nothing is scaled, so nothing is resampled. What can cost you a little is the re-encode: saving as JPEG or WebP compresses the result again, and a photo that has already been through JPEG once picks up a second generation of loss. It is usually invisible at high quality, but if you plan several rounds of edits, work in PNG until the last step. Save as PNG here and the cropped pixels come out bit for bit identical to the ones you selected.

An aspect ratio is just the shape — 16:9 means sixteen units wide for every nine tall, at any size. Square (1:1) is the traditional shape for profile pictures and avatars. 16:9 is the shape of video and of most screens, so it suits thumbnails and cover images. 4:3 and 3:2 are the classic camera shapes, which is what most phone photos already are. 4:5 and 9:16 are the portrait shapes that fill a phone screen. Platforms change their exact pixel requirements often enough that it is worth checking whatever help page you are uploading to — but get the ratio right here and the pixel size is then just a resize away.

Phones usually record every photo in the same orientation and attach a small EXIF tag saying which way up it should be shown. Software that reads the tag displays it correctly; software that ignores it shows the photo on its side. This tool asks the browser explicitly to honour that tag when it opens the file, so a portrait photo should arrive portrait. If one still comes in the wrong way round — an unusual camera, or a file that has been through an app that stripped the tag — the rotate buttons fix it in one tap, and the rotation is baked into the pixels of the file you download, so it cannot come back.

The readout under the crop box is measured in the real pixels of your file, so you can drag until it says what you need. Bear in mind that the preview is scaled to fit the panel: on a large photo, one pixel of mouse movement can be several pixels of image, so landing on an exact number by dragging is fiddly. If you need an exact final size rather than an exact crop, the reliable order is to crop to the right shape here, save it, then set the precise width and height with the image resizer. Two deliberate steps take less time than one awkward one.

No, to both. There is no server involved. Your browser reads the file, draws the selected region onto a canvas and encodes a new image on your own device, which is why this keeps working with your internet disconnected once the page has loaded. Nothing is written to localStorage either — not the image, not the crop, not your settings — so closing the tab leaves nothing behind. The one third-party request the page makes is for the advertising, and that happens whether or not you open a file.

Yes. The image is rebuilt from raw pixels before it is encoded again, so camera model, timestamps and GPS coordinates do not carry across into the file you download. That is usually what you want before posting a picture publicly, since a photo straight from a phone often records where it was taken. It also means the metadata is genuinely gone rather than merely hidden — some tools only stop displaying it. If you need the original data, keep the original file.

Because PNG has no lossy mode, and the browser ignores the quality value completely when encoding one. Leaving the slider on screen would be a control that pretends to do something. PNG compresses losslessly instead, which is perfect for screenshots, logos and anything with transparency, but for a photograph it usually produces a much larger file than JPEG or WebP at a quality nobody can tell apart. If your cropped photo comes out surprisingly heavy as a PNG, that is why — switch to WebP.