Crop Image

Cropping is composition, not just trimming

The most useful crops are rarely about removing something unwanted at the edge. They are about changing where the eye goes. Tightening in on a subject removes competing detail; shifting the frame so the subject sits a third of the way across rather than dead centre usually reads as more deliberate.

For portraits and profile pictures, leave a little space above the head and crop below the shoulders rather than at the neck. For product shots, keep the margin around the object even on all sides. For screenshots, crop to the region you are actually discussing — a full-screen capture where the point occupies 5% of the frame wastes the reader's attention.

Because the crop is applied to the original file rather than to a preview, the output keeps the source resolution within the selected region. Cropping to a quarter of the frame gives you a quarter of the pixels, so start from the largest version of the image you have.

Aspect ratios and where they are required

1:1 square is the safe choice for profile pictures across almost every platform, since square crops well into a circle.

16:9 is the standard for video thumbnails, presentation slides and most screen content. 4:3 is the older screen and camera ratio, still common in documents. 3:2 is the classic 35mm photographic ratio, which is what most cameras produce natively.

9:16 vertical is what full-screen mobile formats want — stories, reels, shorts. Cropping a landscape photo to 9:16 loses a great deal from the sides, so those formats generally need to be shot vertically rather than salvaged afterwards.

With a ratio locked, the height follows the width automatically and the height field is disabled, which prevents accidentally producing something a fraction off the ratio a platform demands.

Rotation and flipping

Rotation here is in 90-degree steps, applied after the crop. That order matters: the selection you draw is in the original orientation, and the rotation is applied to the extracted region. For a photo that came off the camera sideways, rotate and crop in one pass rather than exporting twice.

Horizontal flipping is worth knowing for one specific case: text photographed in a mirror, or a scan made through the back of a page. It also gets used to make a portrait subject face into the page rather than out of it, though be careful with anything containing writing or logos, which become obviously reversed.

Neither operation degrades the image. Both are pixel rearrangements rather than resampling, so no detail is lost.

Precision when it matters

Dragging is fast and good enough for most work, but the numeric width and height fields are there when a result must be exact — a banner that has to be precisely 1500 × 500, for instance. Type the numbers and then drag the box to position it, which keeps the size fixed while you choose the region.

The readout below the preview always shows the source dimensions, the crop dimensions, and the crop's offset from the top-left corner. If you need to apply the identical crop to several images, note those numbers and reproduce them.