Image Cropper
Drag a crop box with a rule-of-thirds grid, lock it to a known ratio, or type the rectangle in pixels.
Pixels from the left edge.
Pixels from the top edge.
Ignored for PNG, which is always lossless.
Drop an image here
or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V. Nothing is uploaded.
Crop ratio: —
Everything here runs on your device. Nothing you enter is uploaded or stored.
Cropping is a decision about what to leave out, and the interface either helps you make it or gets in the way. Four number fields are precise and tell you nothing about the picture. A drag box tells you everything and is hopeless at hitting 1080 exactly. This has both, wired to the same state, so you can drag until it looks right and then fix the width to a round number.
How to use it
- Drop an image onto the panel, press Choose an image, or paste from your clipboard.
- Pick an aspect ratio, or leave it on Free to drag any shape you like.
- Drag the box to move it, drag a corner to resize it, or type the rectangle in pixels.
- Choose a format and press Download.
The rule that governs the crop box
A crop box must always stay inside the image. This sounds obvious, and it is where most hand-built croppers break. Drag a corner handle past the edge and the box escapes; lock a ratio and pull until the box is taller than the photo, and the crop samples outside the source. Canvas fills that region with transparent black, so the export has an unexplained band down one side that nobody notices until it is published.
Clamping happens in one place here, in one order: the size is limited first, then the position. Doing it the other way round leaves an oversized box still hanging off the edge. Every dimension is whole pixels, because a fractional crop resamples the image for no reason at all.
The awkward case is a ratio-locked box against an edge. It needs to get wider and cannot. Growing the width and clamping afterwards would hand back 15.2:9 when you asked for 16:9, so instead the height shrinks and the ratio survives. A slightly smaller box is a better answer than a slightly wrong shape.
Ratios with their uses attached
“4:3” means nothing to most people. “A standard camera photo and most tablets” means something. Each ratio in the list carries what it is for, and the list stays short deliberately — twenty ratios is a worse interface than nine, because the long tail is never what anyone came for.
Square covers profile pictures and Instagram posts. 16:9 is video, widescreen displays and YouTube thumbnails. 9:16 is stories, Reels and TikTok. 3:2 is the classic 35mm frame and a 6×4 inch print; 2:3 is its portrait form. 5:4 is an 8×10 print. Original keeps the source proportions, which is how you shrink a frame without changing its shape.
The thirds grid, and why it is on by default
The grid is the reason a visual cropper beats numeric entry for anything with a subject in it. Placing a horizon or a face on a third rather than dead centre is the oldest compositional rule there is, and it is much easier to see than to calculate. The guides are drawn over the box rather than the whole image, so they move with the crop.
Underneath the preview, the tool reports what percentage of the original pixels you are keeping. Cropping to 20% of a photo and then wondering why it looks soft when printed is a common and avoidable surprise — the number tells you before you save.
What it does not do
It does not upscale, so a tight crop of a small image stays small. It does not remove the background, straighten a horizon, or detect faces. Nothing is uploaded; the file never leaves your device.
Questions
How do I crop an image to an exact size in pixels?
Type the width and height into the numeric fields rather than dragging. The x and y fields set the top-left corner, so the same four numbers reproduce the same crop on any image of the same dimensions. Dragging updates those fields live, which means you can rough the box in by hand and then correct one number.
Why does my crop box stop before the edge of the photo?
Because a crop box that leaves the image would sample pixels that do not exist, and the canvas fills that area with transparent black — you would get a mystery band down one side of the export. With a ratio locked, a box that cannot grow wider shrinks in height instead, which keeps the ratio you asked for rather than silently bending it.
Does cropping reduce the quality of the image?
The crop itself does not. It copies the pixels inside the box unchanged, so a crop saved as PNG is pixel-identical to that region of the original. What costs quality is re-encoding: saving a JPEG crop compresses it a second time. Choose PNG for a lossless crop, or keep the quality slider high.
What is the difference between cropping and resizing?
Cropping throws pixels away to change the framing, so a 4:3 photo becomes a square by losing the sides. Resizing keeps the whole image and changes how many pixels describe it. If you need a square version of a rectangular photo with nothing lost, resize it and accept the letterboxing, or crop it and accept the loss — no tool can do both.
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