crop an image
Drag a rectangle across the picture and keep what is inside it. The real pixel size is shown before you cut, and the picture never leaves this tab.
There is no Google Drive or Dropbox button on purpose: those send the file through a server. Here is what happens instead.
in three steps
- Drop the picture in, or choose it. It is drawn here at whatever size the screen has room for.
- Drag a rectangle across it. Pick a shape first if it has to be square or 16:9, and it stays that shape.
- Crop, and what you get is exactly the pixels inside the rectangle, in the format you started with.
how it works
The rectangle you drag is stored as a proportion of the picture rather than as pixels on your screen. That sounds like a detail and is the whole thing: a photograph from a phone is four thousand pixels wide and is shown here in a few hundred, so a crop measured in screen pixels would cut the wrong piece out on a laptop and a different wrong piece out on a phone.
When you press the button, the proportion becomes pixels once, against the real dimensions, and those pixels are copied straight into a new picture. Nothing is scaled, so a crop never softens what it keeps. The number beside the selection is that figure, before anything is written.
crop first, then resize
If a picture has to be both a different shape and a smaller file, do it in that order. Cropping throws away pixels you decided you did not want; resizing averages the pixels you kept. Resizing first makes the second step work from less to begin with, and it shows.
Resizing is the next tool along, and compressing after that if the file still has to be smaller.
what a crop does to the metadata
A cropped picture is a new picture, drawn from the pixels of the old one, so the EXIF block does not come with it: no camera model, no timestamp, no GPS coordinates. That is a side effect rather than a promise, and it is worth knowing in both directions — if you wanted those kept, they are gone, and if stripping them was the point, remove metadata does it deliberately and without touching a single pixel.
questions
Where does my photo go?
Nowhere. It is drawn, cut and written by your own browser. The job log counts the requests the page made while working and how many of them left this site; the second number is zero, which your browser's network panel will confirm.
Is the crop as accurate as what I dragged?
Yes, and the number beside the selection says exactly what it will be: the rectangle is kept as a proportion of the picture, not as screen pixels, so a photograph shown 600 pixels wide on a phone still cuts at the full resolution of the original.
Does cropping lose quality?
The pixels you keep are the pixels you had — nothing is scaled. A JPEG is re-encoded to save it, which costs a little, and a PNG is not lossy at all. If you also need it smaller, crop first and then resize, in that order, so the resizing works from everything you kept.
Can I crop several pictures at once?
Not here, on purpose. The rectangle you drag is a proportion of the picture it was drawn on, so the same rectangle applied to photographs of different shapes would cut a different piece out of each one. A batch crop that quietly did that would be worse than no batch crop.
Does the location data come out with the crop?
No. The picture is redrawn from its pixels, so the EXIF block — the camera, the date, the GPS coordinates — does not survive into the new file. If that is what you came for, use remove metadata instead: it strips those without touching the image at all.