Crop image

Free crop or classic ratios (1:1, 16:9…). Free, no upload. 1 GB max · Up to 1 GB · Processed locally, never sent to a server.

A photo is badly framed: too much sky, an arm poking in at the edge, a document shot at an angle in the middle of a table. Cropping means keeping one rectangle of the image and throwing the rest away. This tool does it inside the page, with a preview on which you draw the area to keep, with a finger or with the mouse.

The preview is a reduced copy, 640 pixels wide at most, used only for aiming. The cut itself applies to the original image at its full resolution: the coordinates of the frame are divided by the reduction factor of the preview, then the matching rectangle is copied pixel for pixel into a new canvas, with no resampling. Cutting an area out of a photo 6,000 pixels wide therefore gives you back the original pixels of that area, and not an enlargement of the preview.

The output format is not a choice: a PNG dropped comes back as PNG, any other format comes back as JPG encoded at 92 %. The file receives the suffix -recadre, and its exact resolution is shown next to its size.

How to use it

  1. Load an image The drop zone takes any format your browser can display. The tool handles one image at a time: dropping another one replaces the previous file.
  2. Wait for the preview in the Options panel A frame covering 80 % of the image appears, centred. The line above it reads Zone, followed by width × height in px, expressed in the pixels of the original.
  3. Choose a ratio or stay on Free Five pills are offered: Free, Square 1:1, 16:9, 4:3 and 3:4 (portrait). Clicking one of them immediately recomputes the height of the frame from its width.
  4. Draw or move the frame A drag started on the image traces a selection from that point. A drag started inside the frame moves it without changing its size.
  5. Click Run The file produced carries the suffix -recadre and shows its final resolution. It contains nothing but the selected area.

The gestures the preview understands

Two gestures only, told apart by where they start. A press on the image outside the frame switches to drawing mode: the selection restarts from nothing under your finger and grows as long as you do not let go. A press inside the frame switches to moving mode, the dimensions staying unchanged. There are no handles, so a plain click outside the frame shrinks the selection to a tiny square that has to be drawn again.

The interface relies on pointer events, common to the mouse, the stylus and touch, and movement is listened for across the whole window: the drag carries on if the cursor leaves the preview. The frame can neither leave the image nor drop below about a dozen pixels a side. The information line gives the size of the future file continuously.

Standard ratios, social networks and ID photos

The 1:1 square matches profile pictures and avatars, 16:9 video thumbnails and cover banners, 4:3 compact cameras and slide decks, 3:4 the same proportion in portrait. When a ratio is active, the height follows from the width: while you draw, only your horizontal movement counts. If the computed height goes past the edge of the image, it is pulled back to the border and the proportion is no longer held; you then have to draw a narrower frame.

The 4:5 portrait format, common in social feeds, is not among the pills: you have to stay on Free and trust the Zone readout. The tool also fixes a proportion, never a number of pixels; if a platform demands precise dimensions, crop to the right ratio here, then run the result through Resize an image.

For an ID photo, care is needed. Wherever the 35 × 45 mm format applies, the United Kingdom and the Schengen countries among them, the ratio is about 0.78, which the 3:4 pill, at 0.75, does not reach. A United States passport photo is 2 × 2 inches, exactly square, so 1:1 matches that proportion. Framing is not the whole story either: the height of the head inside the frame is specified too, and it varies from one country to the next, while several national schemes route online applications through a digital code issued by an approved photographer or booth.

The crop is final in the file produced

The pixels outside the frame are written nowhere in the output file, whose canvas is exactly the size of the selection; no software will be able to find them again. Your original file, on the other hand, is not modified: the tool writes a new file with the -recadre suffix and leaves the other one intact.

A PNG going in comes back as a PNG, without loss. Everything else, JPG, WebP, GIF or AVIF, comes back as JPG at 92 %, encoded by the browser. A cropped JPEG therefore undergoes a second compression, which is a reason to crop once from the original rather than chain crops. And a transparent image that is not a PNG loses its transparency, JPEG having no alpha channel.

What disappears from the metadata

The image is decoded in an image element, redrawn in a canvas, then re-encoded. Nothing along that route carries metadata: the cropped file no longer holds the GPS coordinates, the capture date, the camera model or the colour profile of the original photo.

Orientation is a special case. Current browsers apply the rotation recorded in EXIF at the moment they display the image; the preview therefore shows the photo already turned the right way up, and the crop applies to that version. Since the output no longer carries an orientation tag, the rotation ends up written into the pixels themselves.

Frequently asked questions

How do I resize a frame I have already drawn?

There are no handles to grab: an existing frame can only be moved. To change its size, start a new drag outside it, which restarts from a blank selection at that point.

Does my photo lose resolution?

No. The area kept is copied at 1:1 from the original image, with no enlargement and no interpolation. The total number of pixels simply drops in proportion to the surface removed.

Can I obtain exactly 1080 × 1080 pixels?

Not directly: the pills lock a proportion, not a size. Crop at 1:1, note the dimension shown, then set the value you want with the Resize an image tool.

I cropped a transparent WebP and the background turned opaque.

Only PNG files come back as PNG. The other formats are exported as JPG, which does not handle transparency. Convert your WebP to PNG first, then crop that PNG.

Does drawing work with a finger on a phone?

Yes. The coordinates of the gesture are recomputed from the size at which the preview is actually displayed, which adapts to the width of the screen, so the frame stays accurate after the device is rotated.

Can I get the cut-off part back afterwards?

Not from the downloaded file, which no longer contains it. Load your original image again, still intact, and draw the frame once more.

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