Crop Image

Pick the shape you actually need

Free is the default and lets you drag any rectangle — right for removing a distraction at the edge of a photo or tightening the composition.

1:1 is the square everything social wants: profile pictures, Instagram posts, marketplace thumbnails. 16:9 is widescreen, for video thumbnails and presentation slides. 9:16 is the same shape upright, for Stories, Reels and TikTok. 4:3 and 3:2 are the traditional photographic shapes — 3:2 is what most cameras produce, so it is the one that keeps a photo looking normal.

With a ratio selected the box keeps that shape however you drag it, so you cannot accidentally hand over a near-square that gets cropped again by whatever you upload it to.

Circle crop, and why it has to be a PNG

Tick circle crop and the area outside the circle becomes transparent rather than white. That is what makes it drop cleanly onto any background — a coloured profile card, a slide, a web page.

Because it relies on transparency, a circle crop can only be saved as a PNG; the tool switches to PNG automatically. A JPG would fill the corners with white, which defeats the point — you would get a white square with a circular photo inside it, and the white would show against anything that is not also white. If you only need a circular profile picture, most platforms round the corners themselves, so a square 1:1 crop usually works just as well.

Cropping is not resizing

Worth being clear about, because confusing the two is what produces stretched images. Cropping removes pixels from the edges: the picture gets smaller because there is less of it, and what remains is untouched and exactly as sharp as before. Resizing scales what is there, keeping the whole picture and changing its pixel dimensions.

So when a form demands a square image and you have a landscape photo, cropping is the right answer — resizing to a square would squash it. The only cost of cropping is that you lose whatever was outside the box, so on a small image an aggressive crop can leave you with too few pixels for the size you need.

Output format

Keep the same format as the original unless you have a reason not to. Choose PNG when the image has sharp edges, text or transparency, and JPG for photographs where a smaller file matters. Circle crops are always PNG.

Related tools

Resize Image changes dimensions without removing anything. Profile Photo Maker produces the standard profile-picture sizes in one step, and Compress Image reduces the file size of the finished crop.