Image Cropper: Crop, Rotate and Flip a Photo Online

About the Image Cropper

The Image Cropper cuts a picture down to the part you want. Choose, drop or paste an image, drag the crop box over the area to keep, and save it as PNG, JPEG or WebP. Everything happens in your browser: your photo never leaves your device, nothing is uploaded, and there is no account.

The box has eight handles, one on each corner and one on each side. Drag a handle to resize the box, drag the inside of the box to move it, and use the arrow keys when the box has focus. A rule-of-thirds grid can be switched on to help with composition, and the four fields X, Y, Width and Height always show the box in image pixels, so you can also type an exact crop.

How to use it

The file is saved as <name>-cropped.<ext>, so holiday.photo.jpeg saved as WebP becomes holiday.photo-cropped.webp. Reset puts the box back over the whole picture, clears rotation and flip, and sets the ratio to Free.

Keyboard control

Click the crop box or tab to it. An arrow key moves the box by one step, and Shift with an arrow resizes it from its right and bottom edges. The step is 1 percent of the longer side of the picture, never less than one pixel, so a 4,000 pixel wide photo moves 40 pixels at a time and a small icon moves one.

Aspect ratios and the numbers behind them

An aspect ratio is the width divided by the height:

$r = \frac{w}{h}$

A 16:9 box has $r = 16 / 9 \approx 1.78$. When you choose a ratio, the tool fits the largest centred box of that shape inside the picture. On a 1000 by 500 photo, 1:1 gives a 500 by 500 box starting at x = 250. When the picture is wider than the ratio, the height is kept and the width becomes $h \times r$; when it is taller, the width is kept and the height becomes $w / r$. All values are rounded to whole pixels, so the shape holds to within one pixel.

For a Custom ratio, type two numbers above zero, for example 5 and 4. Zero, empty or non-numeric values show a message under the fields and the previous ratio stays in force.

Worked example

Take a 4000 by 3000 pixel photo and a 16:9 crop. The picture is $4000 / 3000 \approx 1.33$ wide, narrower than 1.78, so the box keeps the full width and its height is

$h = \frac{4000}{16 / 9} = 2250$

pixels. The box is centred, so $y = (3000 - 2250) / 2 = 375$. The output is 4000 by 2250 pixels. Exported as JPEG at quality 90 it is usually well under a third of the size of the original PNG.

Rotate and flip

Rotate turns the picture 90 degrees and flip mirrors it, exactly as shown on screen. The crop box follows the same part of the picture, and the width and height swap after a quarter turn. Under the hood the tool stores one of the eight possible orientations of a rectangle, so turning left then right returns to where you started, and the crop is always taken from the full resolution file, not from the preview.

Saving: PNG, JPEG or WebP

• PNG is lossless and keeps transparency. Quality has no effect on it.
• JPEG is smaller for photographs. It cannot hold transparency, so transparent areas are filled with the background colour you choose, white by default.
• WebP is usually the smallest and keeps transparency.

The crop is made from your original file, not from the preview. Very large pictures are shown scaled down on the page so the browser can hold them, and the page says so under the file name. The saved file still has every pixel of the area you selected. Animated GIF and WebP files are saved from their first frame.

Related tools

To change the size of the whole picture instead, use the Image Resizer. To switch between PNG, JPEG, WebP and other types without editing, use the Image Converter.

Limits worth knowing

The tool crops, rotates and flips. It does not draw, add text or fix colours, and it does not keep EXIF data such as the camera model or GPS position in the saved file. Images above 32 megapixels are refused with a message rather than risking a crash.

Frequently asked questions