Crop a JPG
Cut a JPEG photo down to the part that matters, in the shape you need.
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How it works
Add your images
Drag and drop, paste, or pick files. They upload over an encrypted connection.
Pick a quality or a target size
Use the quality slider, or tell it exactly how many KB or MB you need.
Download
Save each file, or grab them all at once as a ZIP.
Cropping is the edit that most improves an ordinary photo, and it removes the most file size too, because every pixel you cut away is a pixel that no longer has to be stored. Open a JPG, drag the rectangle over the part you want to keep, and download. The cut is made on the full-resolution photo, not on the preview you see.
The result is saved once as a JPG at quality 90. Lock the rectangle to a ratio when the destination expects one: 1:1 for a profile picture, 4:5 or 9:16 for vertical posts, 16:9 for a video thumbnail, 4:3 or 3:4 for classic photo proportions. Free lets you draw any shape.
In a batch every photo gets its own rectangle, so twenty pictures can be cropped differently in one session and downloaded together. Photos are uploaded over an encrypted connection and cropped on our own servers; nothing is kept beyond one hour.
Cropping for prints: paper is not the shape of your sensor
Phone cameras record in 4:3. The classic photo print, 10 by 15 centimetres, is 3:2, noticeably wider. Send a 4:3 picture to a lab as it is, and the machine cuts a strip off the top and bottom without asking, sometimes through the top of a head.
Decide the cut yourself instead. Open Resize, change the unit to Print, choose the 10 by 15 preset, swapping the two numbers for a landscape photo, and set the fit to Fill and crop. The photo is trimmed to the shape of the paper around its centre and sized for 300 dots per inch. When the subject is off-centre, crop it by hand first, a little wider than you need, so the automatic trim has room to work with.
A crop is the cheapest compression
A photo of a person standing in a wide landscape may be nine tenths scenery. Crop to the person and you have thrown away most of the pixels and most of the bytes, with no change at all to how the subject looks. No quality slider can do that.
So when a file has to get under a limit, crop before you compress. In this editor the two work together: draw the rectangle, then switch to Target size and enter the limit. The search runs on the cropped picture, and all of the allowance goes to the part you kept.
Why the cropped JPG is encoded again
A JPEG is stored in blocks of 8 by 8 pixels, and a rectangle drawn freely almost never lines up with them. The cropped area is therefore decoded and saved as a new JPG. At quality 90 that costs nothing you can see, but it is one more generation. Crop from the original file when you can, not from a copy that has already been edited and saved several times. If the cropped picture is going to be worked on further, choose PNG in the Format menu to stop the count there.
Frequently asked questions
Does cropping a JPG reduce its quality?
The part you keep is the same pixels as before, saved again at quality 90. You lose resolution only in the sense that the picture now has fewer pixels in total.
Can I crop to an exact size in pixels?
Crop to the right shape, then switch on Resize and type the width and height. Both are applied in one pass.
Can I crop a photo into a circle?
Yes, with Circle crop. JPEG cannot store the transparent corners a circle needs, so the result is saved as PNG unless you choose another format.
How do I crop many photos to the same shape?
Add them together and pick a ratio. Each photo starts with the largest centred area of that shape, or use Smart position to place it around the subject.
Can I undo a crop after downloading?
Not in the downloaded file; what was cut is gone from it. Your original is untouched, so you can crop it again differently.
Is the photo straightened as well?
Not by the crop. Use the Fine angle slider in the rotate controls to level a horizon, download, and then crop the result.