How to Crop an Image Online
Cropping sounds mechanical and is actually the most editorial thing you do to a photograph. You are deciding what the picture is about by deciding what is no longer in it. The Image Editor keeps the frame at whatever shape you need and lets you move the picture behind it.
Start from where the image is going
The ratio is usually chosen for you by the destination, so find that out first. A square for a profile picture, four by five for a portrait post, sixteen by nine for a video thumbnail or a header, three by two for a print. Cropping to whatever looks nice and then being told the real ratio means doing it twice and losing more of the frame the second time.
If the destination is a social platform, the exact pixel sizes are worth having to hand - the Social Media Image Resizer already holds them.
Where to put the subject
The default instinct is dead centre, and it rarely looks best. Placing the subject roughly a third of the way across the frame gives the picture somewhere to breathe, and leaves the space in front of a person for them to look into. If someone is facing right, leave the room on the right.
For a face, the thing to watch is headroom. A little space above the head looks intentional; a lot looks like the camera was pointing too high, and none at all looks like an accident. Crop so the eyes sit near the upper third of the frame and most portraits come right.
Crop before you do anything else
Cropping changes the dimensions, so anything you did that depended on them - adding a border, positioning a watermark, resizing to an exact size - has to be redone. Crop first, then frame it with the Image Border Adder or compress it, in that order.
Keep the original. A crop is destructive: the pixels outside the frame are gone, and if you later need a wider version there is nothing to recover it from.
Common questions
Does cropping reduce the image quality?
Not the quality of what remains. The pixels you keep are untouched. But there are fewer of them, so a heavily cropped photo may now be too small for where it is going - which is an argument for starting from the largest original available.
What is the difference between cropping and resizing?
Cropping removes part of the picture. Resizing changes how many pixels the whole picture is made of. You often want both, and cropping comes first.
Can I crop to a circle?
The editor can produce a circular crop, which is what a profile picture usually wants. It saves as a PNG so the corners stay transparent rather than white.
How do I crop several photos to the same shape?
Pick the ratio once and keep it as you work through them. Consistency across a set matters more than any individual crop, especially in a grid or a gallery.
Is anything uploaded while I crop?
No. The editor works entirely in your browser, so the photo never leaves your device.
Ready to reframe a picture?