How cropping works here
Your image is decoded by the browser and shown on a preview canvas scaled down to at most 560 pixels wide, so large photos fit on screen. The area outside your crop box is dimmed. When you download, the tool does not crop the small preview. It maps the box back to the original pixel grid by dividing by the preview scale, then copies exactly that rectangle from the full-resolution image onto a new canvas. A 6000-pixel-wide photo therefore gives you a crop in real pixels, not preview pixels, and the live readout above the preview shows the true output size in pixels.
The box starts as a centred rectangle covering 70% of the image. Drag inside it to move, or drag the bottom-right corner to resize. It cannot leave the image and cannot shrink below 16 preview pixels. The cropper is free-form: there are no fixed aspect-ratio presets, so for a square or a 16:9 crop, adjust the box until the readout shows matching proportions, such as 1200 × 1200.
Worked example
You have a 4032×3024 phone photo (about 3 MB as JPG) and want a square profile picture. The preview is 560×420. Drag the box to cover the face and set it to about 330×330 on screen, which corresponds to roughly 2376×2376 real pixels. Downloading as JPG gives a file named cropped-2376x2376.jpg of roughly 1.2 to 2 MB, since less area means less data. If you want a smaller file next, run it through the Image Resizer.
Output format choices
| Format | Transparency | Quality | Use when |
|---|---|---|---|
| PNG | Kept | Lossless | Screenshots, logos, anything with sharp text |
| JPG | Filled white | Lossy, fixed at 92% | Photos for email and upload forms |
| WebP | Kept | Lossy, fixed at 92% | Web pages that support it |
The format menu defaults to your input type (JPG stays JPG, WebP stays WebP, everything else becomes PNG), so cropping a JPG does not silently enlarge it. There is no quality slider; JPG and WebP always use 92%.
Common mistakes
- Cropping a transparent PNG to JPG. Transparent areas turn white, so choose PNG or WebP if you need to keep the cut-out.
- Expecting a pixel-perfect box. Dragging happens on the scaled preview and is converted back to the original, so on very large images a one-pixel drag can shift the crop by several real pixels. Check the pixel readout.
- Cropping animated images. Only the frame the browser displays is exported, so an animated GIF will become a single still.
- Looking for a circle. This tool exports rectangles only. Use Circle Crop for round avatars.
- Sideways photos. If a phone photo looks rotated, fix it first with Rotate and Flip Image, then crop.