How to Crop an Image to Exact Pixels

Drop the image into Crop Image, drag the crop box or type the exact pixel rectangle, lock an aspect ratio if the destination wants one, then crop and download — the pixels you keep are copied untouched, no re-encoding blurs them, and the photo never leaves your browser. Five steps, each with a check you can see on screen.

Nur lokal

Direkt zum Tool? Bild zuschneiden öffnenRechteck ziehen oder eintippen, behaltene Pixel bleiben unangetastetTool öffnen

Die folgende Anleitung ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

"Can you make it 600 by 600?" is the request behind avatars, product shots, link previews and half the forms on the web — and the request is quietly precise: not "smaller", not "roughly square", but this rectangle, in these pixels. Dragging a box on a phone until it looks about right then hoping is not a procedure; this page is the deliberate version, five steps with checks, all of them in your browser.

The tool is the site's Crop Image. Drop a file onto it, and the crop happens locally — the image is decoded in your tab, the rectangle you define is the pixels that survive, and the result downloads straight from the browser. For photographs — which are among the most personal files people carry — that locality is not a luxury: no upload, no copy on someone else's server, and the Network panel can prove it in ten seconds.

One distinction does the heavy lifting on this page, so it is worth stating up front: cropping removes pixels and keeps the survivors exactly as they were, while resizing re-samples every pixel and trades detail for dimensions. Cropping to an exact rectangle is the lossless half of that pair — which is why the procedure can honestly promise that what you keep is untouched.

Every step runs in the Crop Image tool — drop the file, define the rectangle, download the result.

If PNG versus JPG versus WebP is its own question, the guide to image formats explains which format to save the crop into, and why.

The steps

Drop the image onto the page
Open Crop Image and drop the file in, or pick it the ordinary way. The image is decoded in your browser and shown at its real dimensions — the tool displays the true pixel size, not a scaled thumbnail pretending to be the original, because exact-pixel work on a lie about the size would defeat itself.
Check: The image appears with its real width × height shown somewhere near it, and nothing has been uploaded — the Network panel, if you check, stays silent. A HEIC photo from an iPhone may need converting first; the tool tells you rather than pretending.
Define the rectangle — by dragging, or by typing
Drag a box on the image for the fast pass, then — and this is the step that makes the job exact — check the numeric fields beside the canvas, where the rectangle is x, y, width and height in pixels, all editable. Typing 600 and 600 is how "about square" becomes exactly square; dragging alone never quite lands on the number the destination asked for.
Check: The width and height fields show the exact numbers you intend. If you typed them, they are exact by construction; if you dragged, the numbers are how you check whether the drag told the truth.
Lock an aspect ratio if the destination needs one
If the target is a shape rather than a rectangle — 1:1 for avatars, 16:9 for thumbnails and banners, 1.91:1 for Open Graph link previews, 4:3 or 3:2 for the classic photo shapes — lock the ratio and the box stays in that shape as you move and resize it. The presets sit next to the canvas for exactly these cases.
Check: With the ratio locked, drag a corner: the width/height pair keeps the promised proportion (a 600-wide box on 1:1 stays 600 tall). The note beside each preset says what it is for, so you are not memorising ratios.
Crop — the kept pixels are the original pixels
Run the crop. What the tool produces is the rectangle you defined, copied out of the original: no re-encoding of the kept region, no resampling, no quality dial to argue with. Cropping is lossless in the exact sense that the pixels inside the box are the same pixels that were in the photo — just fewer of them.
Check: The result's dimensions equal the rectangle from step two, exactly. That equality is the whole contract of the tool, and it is checkable the moment the crop lands.
Download — with a name that says what it is
Save the result. The download is generated in the browser, and the filename follows the pattern original-stem-WIDTHxHEIGHT — vacation-600x600 — so six months from now the file says what it is without being opened. If the destination also asked for a format (PNG for transparency, JPG for photographs), the guide to image formats covers the choice; a crop does not change it.
Check: The saved file opens anywhere, shows the exact dimensions from step two, and is smaller than the original in proportion to the pixels that were cropped away. The original on disk is untouched.

Exact pixels versus close-enough dragging

A drag-only crop is a guess with a visual interface. The canvas lies by omission — what you see is scaled to fit your screen — and a rectangle that looks square on a laptop is rarely square in pixels. The numeric fields are the truth: they are the exact integers the crop will use, and typing into them is what upgrades the job from approximate to exact.

The workflow the tool is built for is the pair: drag for placement, numbers for precision. Drag the box roughly over the face, the product, the region that matters; then type the width and height the destination asked for and nudge x and y until the composition is right. The drag gives you speed, the numbers give you the promise.

Aspect ratios you will actually be asked for

The presets in the tool are the ratios that recur in real requests: 1:1 for avatars and product shots, 4:3 and 3:2 for classic photo shapes, 16:9 for video-adjacent banners, and 1.91:1 for the link previews social platforms and messaging apps draw. When a request says "square avatar" or "link preview image", it is naming one of these, and locking the ratio turns the request from a hope into a constraint the tool enforces while you compose.

Ratio and size are separate constraints, and it pays to know which one you were given. "600 by 600" is both; "square" is only the ratio, and the pixel dimensions are yours to choose within it. Locking a ratio with no target size is fine; typing a target size with no ratio is how 598 by 601 happens.

Cropping is not resizing — and the difference matters

Cropping removes pixels: the rectangle you keep is copied out exactly, which is why it cannot blur or soften anything. Resizing re-samples the image to new dimensions: every pixel is recomputed, detail is interpolated or thrown away, and an aggressive upscale is where pictures start to look like watercolours. They are different tools for different sentences in the request.

"Make it 600 by 600" from a 4000-wide original is a crop — the destination wants a rectangle, and you have plenty to spare. "Make this 4000-wide photo fit 600 pixels" with no rectangle in the request is a resize. Doing the wrong one wastes the right one: a resize of the full frame then a crop of the result re-samples pixels for nothing. Crop first, resize second — or discover you never needed the resize.

Why the crop happens in your tab

Photographs are the most personal files most people process: rooms, faces, documents, whiteboards with tomorrow's plan on them. Every upload-based cropper asks you to send exactly that to a server that will store it for who knows how long — and a crop is such a small job that the trade never made sense. Here the image is decoded, cropped and re-packed by your own browser, and the Network panel is the receipt: no request carries it.

The metadata angle completes the privacy story: a crop of a region keeps the pixels of that region, but the result written fresh by the browser does not carry the original file's EXIF block — GPS coordinates, camera body, timestamps. For the deliberate version of that job, stripping metadata entirely, the site has a page dedicated to it; for most share-bound crops, it happens as a side effect of the crop being written locally.

Frequently asked questions

Does cropping reduce image quality?

No. Cropping removes pixels and keeps the survivors exactly as they were — there is no resampling, no re-compression of the kept region, no quality slider because nothing in the rectangle is recomputed. The result is sharp at whatever resolution you kept. Quality loss in a crop workflow comes from the resize step, or from re-saving repeatedly in a lossy format, not from cropping itself.

Can I type exact pixel numbers instead of dragging?

Yes, and for exact-pixel jobs you should. The rectangle is exposed as x, y, width and height in real pixels, all editable — typing 600 and 600 produces a 600 by 600 crop by construction rather than by eye. The efficient habit is dragging for placement and typing for the numbers the destination actually specified.

Why is my cropped file smaller than the original?

Because it contains fewer pixels — the whole point of the operation. The size drops roughly in proportion to the area you removed, and also because the result is written fresh by the browser without the original file's metadata block. It is not compression cleverness; it is simply that a crop of half the picture is about half the picture.

Does cropping remove the photo's GPS and camera metadata?

Generally yes: the cropped result is written fresh by your browser, and the original file's EXIF block — GPS coordinates, camera model, timestamps — does not travel with it. If metadata removal is the actual job rather than a side effect you are relying on, the site's EXIF-stripping page does it deliberately and tells you exactly what survived.

What image formats can I crop?

The formats a browser can decode natively — JPG, PNG, WebP and the rest — arrive and crop directly. HEIC, the format iPhones shoot by default, is the notable exception: convert it to JPG first, which the site's HEIC converter does locally. The choice of output format is separate from cropping; the image formats guide covers when to keep PNG, JPG or WebP.

Can I undo a crop?

The original file on disk is never touched — the tool reads it and writes a new file — so "undo" is simply re-cropping from the original. Keep the source photo until you are sure you like the result, and treat every crop as a new file rather than a new version of the old one; that habit is what makes the operation fearless.

ToolsByUs team · How we check our tools