Crop image or crop photo to square, 4:5, 16:9: a free cropping tool

Runs in your browser, so the photo is never uploaded.

By Sam Ridder · Last updated: September 2026

Crop an image on Mac, Windows or Android: no app to install

There is no app to install on a Mac, Windows, Android or iOS: every device gets the same drag-a-box page, and a trackpad works exactly like a mouse. There is no auto mode that guesses the subject for you either. You drag the box yourself, which takes a moment longer but never trims out the wrong thing; an ai crop image feature would guess, and this one doesn't.

Pick the shape first, then the spot

Nine times out of ten the crop is not really your choice: a profile picture has to be square, an Instagram post wants 4:5, a video thumbnail wants 16:9. So set the shape before you start dragging and the box will hold that ratio no matter where you pull it. Everything outside it is greyed out, which makes it obvious what you are about to lose.

Leave it on "Free" when you just want to straighten out a badly framed shot: cut off the empty foreground, the stranger at the edge, the strip of ceiling. The pixel size of your selection is shown as you drag, so you can hit an exact number like 512 × 512 if a site is fussy about it.

Cropping is the only edit that costs you nothing

Worth knowing: a crop does not re-encode the parts you keep. It copies those pixels straight out at full quality, which is why this page saves as PNG rather than putting your photo through JPEG a second time. Compressing, resizing and filtering all cost a little quality. Cropping costs none. Every image crop here is a straight pixel copy, not a re-compression, so quality never degrades no matter how many times you do it.

Related: Remove Scratches from Photo.

That also makes it the smartest first move when a file is too heavy. Half the photo is often sky, table or carpet. Cut that away and you have removed real pixels rather than blurring the ones that matter: then send the result to the compressor if it still needs to be lighter.

Crop picture presets people ask for by name

The presets cover the ratios that get demanded most often; drag to the pixel counter if you need an exact figure.

• Profile picture, WhatsApp DP, avatar: 1:1 square. Anything else gets cut to a circle badly
• Instagram feed post: 4:5 gives you the tallest allowed frame, which takes up the most screen
• Story, Reel, TikTok, Short: 9:16
• YouTube thumbnail, banner, slide: 16:9
• Printed 10 × 15 photo: 3:4 is close enough that nothing important gets trimmed at the lab
• Passport or visa: a plain crop is not enough. The head has to be a set proportion of the frame, so use PassportNinja for that

Cropping in tight on an old or low-resolution scan will show up its softness, because you are enlarging what is left. If that happens, run the crop through the sharpener or upscaler afterwards to rebuild the detail.

A crop photo editor for freehand and preset shapes alike

There is no separate app to open: this crop works entirely on the page. Drag, lock a ratio if you need one, and download, with nothing installed and nothing uploaded. Switch the ratio lock off and the box stops forcing a shape on you, which suits a quick straighten. As a picture crop editor it runs freeform and preset-ratio modes in one panel, and as a plain crop image editor it covers the days when the AI tools on this site are more power than the job needs: trimming a screenshot doesn't need a model, just a box you can drag.

It stays free the whole way through: no watermark on the download, no account and no daily cap, so you can crop picture online free as often as you like, and the picture crop online step runs in the tab you already have open.

Crop image and resize, in the right order

Plenty of people need to crop image and resize together: say, a wide photo that needs to become a square avatar of an exact pixel width. Do the crop first, since it's the only step that removes real information rather than blurring it, then carry the cropped result to the resize page to hit your target size. You can also crop image to size directly when the ratio matters more than the exact pixel count: lock a ratio and drag until it looks right.

Crop images online, one at a time

Crop a photo online here one at a time: a single portrait or a run of photos straight off your phone gets the same result every time. An online photo crop shows a live pixel counter under the photo as you drag, so an image crop online can hit an exact size. You can crop photos in any common format, crop JPG and crop PNG files alike, and the result is saved to PNG, so you can crop pic after pic without losing quality. Every online crop image keeps the pixels exactly as they were, and each photo crop online run takes a second, because the online image crop happens in your browser.

Circles, custom shapes and other things this crop does not do

There is no circle button: crop to a 1:1 square instead, since that is exactly what an app doing its own circle masking (an avatar upload, a profile picture) expects as input. Get the square right and their circle comes out right too. There are no custom shapes beyond the rectangle and ratio presets either; a hexagon or star needs a shape-mask editor, not a crop box.

There is no diagonal crop: the box stays axis-aligned, so straighten a tilted photo first with the rotate tool and then crop square to it. In PowerPoint, Crop to Shape is a separate feature of PowerPoint itself.

Size, backgrounds and special cases

To crop to a size, watch the pixel counter under the photo: it updates live while you drag and shows the image dimensions in width and height. There is no centimetre field, because screens and files work in pixels, so a print-size crop still needs a pixel number to aim for.

Trimming empty wall, sky or carpet out of the frame is exactly what the drag box is for. Removing the image background behind a subject is a different job: for removing a background, BGNinja is the tool, and it can remove the backdrop entirely. The box follows your input exactly, whether that is a mouse, a finger or a stylus.

For store artwork or an Instagram post, hit the exact pixel size or use the 4:5 preset. A scanned drawing works the same as any photo: drag the box to the ink to trim the white margin, and download. Cropping a whole set to the same ratio, for a catalogue or a dataset, works one photo at a time here, one drag per photo.

A free online cropper, nothing uploaded

As an online image cropper there is no software involved: everything happens in the browser tab. It also works as a picture cropper for screenshots and banners: paste a screen capture instead of a photo, or pick the 16:9 preset for a thumbnail or a slide. As an image crop tool it holds whatever ratio you lock, however far you drag the corner handles.

It is free in the plain sense: you can crop photo free of charge, crop pictures free one after another and crop a picture free without an account, with no daily limit and no watermark. Free image crop or free crop image, the result is the same full-resolution PNG. To crop photo online free from a phone, open the page in the browser, and to crop image for free on a desktop, the same. A crop online run saves the moment you are happy with the box.

As an online photo cropper it keeps a live pixel counter under the photo, so you can watch the selection hit an exact image size, and it keeps no copy of the photo afterwards because the crop happens locally. That makes it a photo cropping tool you can use on a borrowed computer too. Because this online image crop tool never uploads, it also suits private photos you would rather not send to a server.

To cut image edges, pull the sides in to remove empty background, a stray foot or a strip of ceiling. That is the whole flow: drag, lock a ratio if you want one, download. Other image cropping sites often put an account wall in front; this one doesn't. There is no browser extension, and the output stays fixed to PNG (JPG in, PNG out), because cropping never re-compresses.

Every crop comes back to the same step: pixels copied straight out, never re-encoded, and so the download has no watermark and no quality loss.

Cropping in other apps, and in CSS

How to crop image in Paint: open the Select tool, drag a rectangle over the part to keep, then click Crop in the ribbon, Paint trims the canvas to that box, but it has no ratio lock, so hitting an exact square or 4:5 means measuring the drag by eye.

How to crop an image in Preview on a Mac: drag a rectangular selection with the selection tool, then press Cmd+K (or Tools → Crop) to trim the file down to it.

One gotcha with how to crop image in Preview specifically: pressing Save overwrites the original file with the cropped version, where this page always hands back a separate download and leaves your upload untouched.

Developers usually want object-fit or a clip-path in the stylesheet rather than a pre-cropped file; this page is still useful first, to trim the source image before it reaches your CSS. The same goes for LaTeX documents and Figma frames: a photo that arrives already cropped saves fighting trim values later.

A css crop image approach usually means object-fit: cover on an <img> tag: it crops visually in the browser for a gallery grid or thumbnail, but the full original file still gets downloaded by every visitor, just hidden by the overflow.

To crop an image with css and a non-rectangular shape, clip-path: polygon() or clip-path: inset() does it, though the same rule applies: CSS only hides pixels, it doesn't remove them, so the file size stays exactly what it was before.

Same idea, for a whole document instead of one photo: ScanReviver's crop PDF trims the margins off every page, or just the ones you name, in a single pass.

Common questions