How to crop photos online without losing quality
By Muhammad Sohaib and Luqman Ahmad · NexixLabs · Updated
Cropping is the quickest way to improve a photo: it removes distractions, fixes the framing and gives the picture the shape a website, a print or an app expects. Done carelessly, it can also leave you with a blurry or oddly sized file.
This guide explains what an aspect ratio is, which ones are common, in which order to crop and resize, and how to crop many photos at once with the free crop tools on this site.
What an aspect ratio is
The aspect ratio is the width divided by the height, written as two numbers. A square is 1:1, a typical camera photo is 3:2 or 4:3, widescreen video is 16:9 and a vertical phone video is 9:16. When you crop to a ratio, the box keeps that proportion while you move and resize it, so nothing is stretched.
- 1:1 – profile pictures, product grids and album covers.
- 4:5 and 3:4 – portrait photos.
- 4:3 and 3:2 – the shapes most cameras and prints use.
- 16:9 – widescreen images, banners and video thumbnails.
- 9:16 – vertical images for stories and short videos.
Crop first, then resize
Cropping throws away the pixels outside the box, and resizing changes the size of what is left. Do the crop first and the resize second. That way you choose the framing on the full-detail photo and scale only once, which keeps the picture as sharp as possible.
The crop tools on this site follow that order automatically: the crop is applied first, and a maximum width or height is then applied to the cropped area. A 4000 × 3000 photo cropped to a square and limited to 1080 px becomes 1080 × 1080.
Keeping quality high
Cropping itself does not blur a photo, because it only removes pixels. Quality is lost when the cropped picture is saved again in a lossy format such as JPEG or WebP at a low quality setting. Use a quality of 85–90% for photos you care about, or choose PNG when you need a lossless result.
Avoid cropping the same file several times in a row in a lossy format. Keep the original, crop it once to the final shape and save the result under a new name.
Cropping many photos to the same shape
For a set of product photos, team portraits or gallery images, pick one aspect ratio and apply it to the whole batch. Each photo is cropped around its center. If the subject sits off-center in a few of them, open those images and draw their own crop. A crop drawn by hand takes priority over the batch shape for that image.
Finish the batch with a maximum width so all images share one pixel size, and a modern format such as WebP to keep the files small.
Cropping without uploading your photos
Asset Compressor crops images inside your browser. The photos are not sent to a server, so private pictures and unreleased product photos stay on your device. The crop editor works with the keyboard as well: focus the crop box and use the arrow keys to nudge it, and hold Shift to move faster.