Crop Images Online

How to crop an image

Drop a photo onto the panel above, drag the selection over the part you want to keep, and press Crop.

Cropping is the least destructive edit there is: the pixels inside your selection keep their original resolution, because cropping removes area rather than rescaling anything. Drag the edges or corners to frame the subject, and if you are working from the keyboard, hold Shift to keep the current proportions or Alt to resize from the centre — the same modifiers Photoshop uses.

Lock the shape with an Aspect ratio preset when the destination demands one: 1:1 for avatars, 4:5 for portrait feed posts, 16:9 for thumbnails and video covers, 9:16 for stories and Reels. Stay on Free when you are simply improving the composition. Either way, watch the Output readout in the panel — it shows the exact pixel size of your selection before you commit, and it is the fastest way to avoid a crop that frames perfectly but comes out too small. A 1:1 selection reading 280 × 280 will look soft as a 400 px avatar however good the framing is.

To crop and resize in one go, crop to the ratio here and then resize the result to exact dimensions. Doing it in that order means you choose what gets cut, instead of letting a resize stretch the frame into a shape it was never composed for.

How to convert a photo to passport size

Pick a size under Passport & ID photos: 35 × 45 mm for most passports and visas worldwide, 2 × 2 in for a US passport, or 25 × 35 mm stamp size for application forms.

The selection locks to that document's proportions and the saved file comes out at the exact pixel dimensions portals expect at 300 DPI, so there is no arithmetic to do. This is the one place the tool does rescale your crop, because matching the specification is the entire point of the exercise rather than a side effect.

Framing guidance, the size-by-country table, and what to do when the portal also imposes a KB limit are all on the dedicated passport photo maker page.

How to crop a picture into a circle

Switch Shape to Circle, drag the round selection over your subject, and press Crop. Everything outside the circle becomes transparent and the result saves as a PNG.

The Size presets — Profile at 400 px, Icon at 512 px, Thumbnail at 150 px — fix the output dimensions so the only thing left to decide is placement. PNG is not optional here: the transparent corners are the whole point, and JPG has no alpha channel to store them in, so a circular JPG would arrive with black or white corners instead.

Worth knowing before you bother: most platforms that display round avatars accept a square image and mask it themselves. A genuinely circular file matters when you are placing the image yourself — in a slide, a document, or a web page over a coloured background. The circle crop page goes into both cases.

Which aspect ratio for each platform

Most platforms crop your image for you if you do not, and they rarely crop where you would — so choosing the ratio yourself is the difference between a considered image and a truncated one.

If an image has to work in more than one place, crop the widest version first and keep the subject near the centre, because a later square or vertical crop will still contain it. To hit exact pixel dimensions as well as the ratio — 1080 × 1350, say — crop here and then set those numbers in the Resize tool.

Crop or resize: which do you need?

Crop changes what is in the frame. Resize changes how many pixels the frame contains. When a target demands a shape your photo does not have, you need both, in that order.