Choose your crop

The shape you reach for depends on where the image is going. A round cut-out suits anything that shows up inside a circle — profile pictures, team avatars, contact thumbnails — and it leaves the corners transparent so the photo sits flat against any background without a white border. A free rectangle is the everyday choice for tightening a shot, removing a distraction at the edge, or re-centring the subject. When an upload form expects exact measurements, a fixed ratio or a named social-media size handles the math for you, keeping the proportions locked so the result lands correctly. Pick the one that matches the destination and the rest is a single drag.

The crop runs locally from start to finish. When you open a file, the browser opens and processes the image in your device's memory, you mark the area to keep, and that region is reconstructed and saved as a fresh file to download. The photo is cropped right there, immediately, with no upload queue and no wait for a server response. That keeps the flow fast and is especially practical for ID photos, screenshots, or any image you would rather handle directly on your device without passing it through a third-party service. The /privacy/ page explains how files are managed.

Cropping does not blur or soften the image. You are keeping a section of the original at its native detail level and discarding the rest, so what stays looks exactly as it did before. The one thing to watch is final size: the crop is smaller than the source, so stretching a small crop to fill a large frame can look soft simply because there is less detail to cover that area. Crop close to the size you will actually display and the result stays sharp. Saving as PNG keeps every detail and any transparency. JPG trades a small amount of fidelity for a lighter file.

Match the format to the job. PNG is the right choice when the crop has transparent areas — a circular avatar above all — because it preserves the see-through corners the round shape leaves behind. It also keeps full detail, at the cost of a heavier file. JPG is the right call for rectangular photo crops headed for the web, where a smaller file loads faster and the slight trade in fidelity is invisible at normal viewing sizes. WebP sits in between, smaller than PNG and sharper than JPG at the same size, and supported across current browsers. When in doubt, PNG for round or detail-heavy crops, JPG for everyday photos.

These three get confused but they solve different problems. Cropping changes what the image shows by cutting away part of the frame — the composition changes, and what remains keeps its original detail. Resizing keeps the whole image and changes its dimensions, useful when something needs to be a specific width or height. Compressing keeps both the framing and the dimensions and only shrinks the file on disk by storing it more efficiently. Often you want more than one: crop first to fix the framing, then resize or compress for the final destination. Each lives in its own tool so you chain them in whatever order the task needs.

Every platform has its preferred dimensions, and uploading the wrong proportions means white bars, automatic trimming, or a stretched result. Fixed ratios like 1:1 for square profiles, 16:9 for covers and video thumbnails, and 9:16 for stories lock the selection to the right proportion while you adjust what appears inside. Social-media presets go a step further: the crop box opens at the exact dimensions each platform expects, so you skip the number lookup entirely. You frame what you want to show and download an image that uploads cleanly, without the platform auto-cropping your subject.