About this tool
Cropping is the one image job where typing numbers is genuinely hard. You can work out a resize in your head, but nobody looks at a photograph and knows that the part they want starts 812 pixels from the left. So this tool gives you a box you can drag over the picture, with the discarded area shaded and the kept area shown at full brightness, so you are judging the crop on the actual image rather than on a dimmed version of it.
Underneath the dragging, the four number fields are still the real controls. They hold the left edge, top edge, width and height in the original picture’s pixels, and they stay synchronised in both directions: move a corner and the numbers change, type a number and the box jumps. That is what makes the tool work for both kinds of task. Trimming a distracting background is a dragging job. Cutting a photo to precisely 200 × 230 pixels because a form said so is a typing job, and doing it by eye would be miserable.
The whole thing also works from the keyboard, which is not a box-ticking exercise here. Tab to the selection and the arrow keys nudge it ten pixels; Shift turns those same keys into resize; Alt drops the step to one pixel for fine work and Ctrl raises it to fifty for crossing a large picture. The shape menu locks a proportion while you do it, so a square stays square however you drag or nudge it.
Nothing is uploaded. The picture is decoded in your browser, the selected region is copied to a new canvas, and that canvas is encoded and offered as a download. It never reaches a server, which is worth knowing when the photograph in question is a document or an ID.
How to use this tool
- Choose your picture. JPG, PNG or WebP, up to 50 MB. It appears with the crop selection covering the whole frame, so you are trimming inwards from the full picture.
- Drag the selection where you want it. Drag inside the box to move it, drag a corner handle to resize it, or press anywhere on bare image to start a fresh selection from that point. The shaded area is what gets thrown away.
- Lock a shape if you need one. The Shape menu offers Free, Square (1:1), Portrait (3:4), Passport (35:45), Landscape (4:3) and Wide (16:9). With one of them chosen, resizing keeps that proportion. Select whole image puts the box back around everything.
- Or type the numbers instead. Left edge, top edge, crop width and crop height are ordinary number fields in original image pixels. Type into them and the box on the picture moves; drag the box and the numbers update. Either direction works.
- Pick a format, run and download. JPG for the smallest file, PNG or WebP to keep transparency. The result shows the file size and the final dimensions.
What this tool does not do
- Rectangles only. No circles, rounded corners or freehand shapes.
- No rotation or straightening. Crop, and nothing else.
- It cannot aim at a file size in KB — send the cropped file to the compress-to-KB tool for that.
- The selection cannot be smaller than 8 pixels while dragging.
- Shape presets set a proportion, not a verified requirement of any form. Confirm dimensions on the portal you are applying to.
Common questions
Can I do this without a mouse?
Yes, entirely. Tab to the crop selection and the arrow keys move it 10 pixels at a time. Hold Shift with an arrow key to resize instead of move. Hold Alt for single-pixel steps, or Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) for 50-pixel jumps. The four number fields are also reachable by Tab and take typed values directly.
What do the numbers actually refer to?
The original image's own pixels, not what you see on screen. The preview is scaled down to fit your window, so a 4000-pixel-wide photo displayed 400 pixels wide still reports coordinates up to 4000. That is what makes typing exact numbers reliable.
Is the Passport (35:45) preset an official size?
It is a shape, nothing more — the 35:45 proportion that many photo boxes use. It sets no dimensions and no file size, and it does not check anything. Read your own portal's current instructions and set the pixel numbers yourself.
It says the crop area needs to sit inside the original image.
The left edge plus the width has run past the picture's width, or the top edge plus the height past its height. This only happens with typed numbers; dragging cannot leave the frame. Reduce the width or move the left edge back.
Does cropping reduce the quality of what is left?
The kept pixels are copied across as they are, but the file is written out again, and a JPG saved again always loses a little. It is saved at high quality so the loss is not visible in normal use. Choosing PNG avoids it entirely at the cost of a much larger file.
Can I crop to a circle or a rounded shape?
No. The selection is a rectangle and the output is a rectangle. For a round profile picture, crop to a square here and let the app you are uploading to round the corners, which is what they all do anyway.
My transparent PNG has a white background now.
The output format was JPG, which has no transparency and fills it with white. Switch the output format to PNG or WebP.