Crop an Image — Free & Private

Which output format to choose

Cropping itself is lossless: the pixels inside the box are copied out untouched. What can cost quality is what happens next — the kept pixels have to be written back into a file, and that encoding is a real choice with real consequences.

This tool used to write PNG and nothing else, which is the worst possible default for the commonest input. PNG is lossless, so it stores every pixel of a photograph exactly — and a photograph has no flat areas to compress, so a 2 MB JPEG cropped to half its size could come back larger than the original. Nothing was gained: the JPEG’s compression artefacts were preserved in perfect detail.

So the output is now yours to pick, and Match the original is the default:

• JPG — right for photographs. Small, universally accepted, and the quality loss from one re-encode at 92% is invisible next to what the camera already did. It cannot store transparency.
• PNG — right for screenshots, logos, diagrams and anything with transparency or flat colour. Lossless, and on that kind of image it is also smaller than JPEG as well as sharper.
• WebP — smallest of the three at the same quality, keeps transparency, and every current browser reads it. Older software may not.

One quirk worth knowing, because it is in the HTML specification rather than being a bug: if you ask a browser for a format it cannot write, canvas.toBlob hands back a PNG with no error at all. So this page checks what it actually got and names the file after the real bytes — never a .webp that is secretly a PNG — and tells you when it had to substitute.

Cropping strips the metadata — including GPS

A cropped image comes out with no EXIF metadata: no camera model, no timestamp, no lens data, and no GPS coordinates. That is not a feature we added; it is a property of drawing an image onto a canvas and reading it back, which is what every browser-based cropper does.

It is worth knowing in both directions. If you are about to post a photograph publicly, losing the GPS tag is a good thing — phone photos routinely carry the exact location they were taken, and cropping here removes it. If you are cataloguing photographs and rely on capture dates, the crop will cost you them, so keep the originals. To strip metadata without re-encoding the picture, use Metadata Remover, which removes the tags and leaves the image data alone.

Why do it in the browser at all?

Every free cropper that ranks for this does the same thing your browser can already do, and uploads your photograph to do it. iLoveIMG, Fotor, Adobe Express, Canva and img2go all send the file to a server, which means an upload wait proportional to the file, a size cap set to protect their bandwidth rather than your needs, and a copy of your picture somewhere you cannot see. Several of the better editors also want an account before you can download.

None of that is necessary. Cropping is a rectangle copy — the single cheapest operation in image editing — and the browser has had a fast, colour-accurate implementation of it for over a decade. This page uses that: the file is opened on your device, the crop is drawn on your device, and the download comes from memory. There is no upload step, so there is nothing to wait for, no cap, and nothing of yours to delete afterwards.

The honest cost is that a server-based editor can offer things a small page will not: layers, healing brushes, content-aware fill. If you want those, an editor is the right tool. If you want a rectangle out of a picture, this is faster and the picture stays with you.

Capabilities at a glance

What this tool does and does not do, stated plainly. The “No” rows are the point, not an omission.