Cropping does not lose quality, but re-encoding does
Cropping itself is a lossless operation: it discards pixels outside the selection and keeps the rest exactly as they were. What can lose quality is what happens next. Saving the result as JPEG runs lossy compression over the remaining pixels, and if the source was already a JPEG, that is a second generation.
This tool saves at quality 92, high enough that the difference is invisible in normal viewing. If you need genuinely lossless output, crop a PNG — the result is then pixel-identical to the region you selected.
Aspect ratios, and why they are not just numbers
A ratio is a relationship between pixel dimensions, not between fractions of an image. That sounds obvious and it is the single most common bug in cropping tools: on a 3000 × 2000 photo, a selection that is 50% wide and 50% tall is not square, it is 1500 × 1000. Getting a true square requires converting through the actual dimensions.
The ratios offered here cover most needs. Square for avatars and profile pictures. 4:5 for Instagram portrait, which occupies the most feed space. 3:2 for standard photographic prints. 16:9 for video thumbnails and presentation slides. Free when you simply want to remove something from the edge of a frame.
Crop, then resize — in that order
When you need both, crop first. Resizing first scales pixels that are about to be thrown away, which wastes the resampling quality on parts of the image you will not keep. This tool crops before it resizes for that reason, and it is worth following the same order manually if you are combining tools.
If your goal is a specific final size for a platform, the resizer may be the better tool: its fill-and-crop mode does both steps in one pass and centres the crop automatically. Use this cropper when you want to choose what stays in frame yourself.
Keyboard and precision
Dragging handles is convenient and imprecise, and impossible without a pointer. Every selection here is also editable as four numbers — left, top, width and height, in percent — which are fully keyboard-operable and let you reproduce an exact crop across several images. The numbers and the handles are the same values, so you can start with one and finish with the other.
Other cropping tools
- Circle crop — for round avatars, with a smoothed transparent edge.
- UK passport photo — cropping to a document specification is a different job, with a head-height rule a free crop cannot satisfy.
- Resize to exact dimensions — when the final size matters more than the framing.
- Compress — after cropping, if the file still needs to be smaller.