Crop an Image Online — Free, No Upload

Cropping is not free, even though it looks like it

You are throwing pixels away, so it feels like an operation that cannot cost anything. It does. The browser has to decode the JPEG into raw pixels, cut the rectangle out, and encode a new JPEG from scratch. That second encode is lossy, so the pixels you kept are very slightly worse than the ones you started with.

There is a way to crop a JPEG without re-encoding at all, because JPEG stores the image in blocks — usually 8 or 16 pixels square. Cut on a block boundary and the untouched blocks can be copied across byte for byte. Command line tools such as jpegtran do exactly this. A browser cannot: it has no access to the compressed blocks, only to the decoded picture. So this tool re-encodes, and the quality slider defaults to 92 rather than the usual 85 to keep the second generation close to the first.

PNG and WebP-lossless have no such problem. Cropping those is genuinely lossless because the encoder is lossless.

Ratios worth knowing

• 1:1 — square. Profile pictures, product grids, anything that has to look the same in a round mask.
• 16:9 — video. A 1280×720 thumbnail is the usual size for a YouTube video.
• 9:16 — vertical video and stories. The same frame turned on its side.
• 1.91:1 — the shape of a link preview card. 1200×630 is the size most social platforms and link unfurlers expect for an Open Graph image.
• 4:5 — the tallest portrait most feeds will show without cropping it themselves.
• 3:2 — what most cameras shoot, and the shape of a 6×4 inch print.

The thirds grid over the selection is there for composition: putting the subject on a line rather than dead centre is an old habit from painting that still works, though it is a suggestion rather than a rule.

How much you can afford to cut

Cropping spends resolution, and the spending is quadratic rather than linear. Take half the width and half the height and you are left with a quarter of the pixels: a 12-megapixel phone photo becomes a 3-megapixel one. That is still more than enough for anything on a screen, where a full-width web image rarely needs more than 2 megapixels, and it is getting thin for a large print.

The practical rule is to check the width and height fields rather than the percentage in your head. If the numbers are still above roughly 1600 pixels on the long side, the result will look fine anywhere on the web. Below about 800 you will start to see it.

Crop first, then resize

If you need a specific pixel size and a specific shape, do it in that order. Crop to the right proportions, then resize to the exact numbers. Doing it the other way round means either squashing the image or cropping twice, and each resample softens the result a little more.

Where this tool stops

• One image at a time. Cropping is a judgement call about a specific picture, so there is no batch mode — the same rectangle on ten different photographs is almost never what you want.
• No rotation or straightening. If your horizon is crooked, this will not fix it.
• Metadata is dropped. The output is a fresh file: no EXIF, no GPS, no copyright field, no embedded colour profile. Good for privacy, bad if you needed the copyright tag.
• Animated GIFs come out still. Only the first frame is read.
• Very large images can fail. The preview is scaled down to fit, but the crop itself works on the full resolution image, and a browser tab has a memory ceiling. Mobile Safari is the strictest about this.
• The preview is a preview. It is scaled to fit your screen, so the pixel values in the fields are the truth and the box is an approximation of it. If you need an exact rectangle, type the numbers.

The numeric fields are also the accessible path. A canvas you drag on cannot be operated with a keyboard in any meaningful way, so the left, top, width and height inputs do everything the mouse does — and with the preview focused, arrow keys nudge the box by ten pixels, or one pixel with alt held.

Last updated September 19, 2026