Crop image to 16:9 online
Drag a crop box or type exact numbers, with presets for square, portrait, widescreen and YouTube thumbnails.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your image is never uploaded.
Drop an image here, or choose a file
JPG · PNG · WEBP
Drag inside the box to move it, or drag a corner to resize. On a phone, use the number fields below instead.
Your cropped image appears here.
How to use the image cropper
- Load your image. It appears at a size that fits your screen, but every crop is calculated against the original full-resolution pixels, so you lose no quality to the preview.
- Choose an aspect ratio first if you need a specific shape. Locking the ratio before you frame the shot means you cannot accidentally end up at 15:9 when you wanted 16:9.
- Drag inside the crop box to reposition it, or grab a corner handle to resize. The four number fields update as you drag, and you can type into them directly if you need pixel-exact placement or you are on a touch screen.
- Press Crop image and download. Choosing the YouTube preset also scales the output to exactly 1280 by 720, which is what the upload form expects.
What you can use it for
YouTube thumbnails are the reason the dedicated preset exists. The specification is 1280 by 720 pixels at 16:9, under 2 MB, and creators who ignore it end up with a thumbnail that gets letterboxed or cropped by YouTube in ways that cut off the face or the text they spent an hour placing.
Instagram rewards deliberate cropping. Square 1:1 still suits grid consistency, but 4:5 portrait occupies substantially more vertical space in the feed, which means more screen time per scroll. Cropping to 4:5 before you post is one of the cheapest reach improvements available.
Profile pictures are almost always cropped to a circle by the platform, and the circle is inscribed inside a square. Cropping to 1:1 yourself, with your face centred and some margin, prevents the platform from making that decision badly for you.
Straightforward tidying is the everyday case: removing a distracting edge, cutting out a person at the side of a group photo, trimming the empty space around a screenshot so the important part fills the frame when it appears in a blog post.
Things to know
Cropping removes pixels permanently from the output. A 4000-pixel-wide photo cropped to its centre third produces a roughly 1300-pixel-wide image. That is still plenty for the web, but crop aggressively enough and you will not have the resolution left for a large display or a print.
The 16:9 ratio is 1.7778 to one, not 1.78 or 1.8. Small ratio errors produce a one or two pixel black bar when a player or platform pillarboxes your image to fit. The presets use the exact values so this does not happen.
The YouTube preset does two things: it locks the crop box to 16:9 and it scales the result to exactly 1280 by 720 on export. If you crop a region smaller than 1280 wide, it will be scaled up to reach the specification, which softens it. Crop a region at least 1280 pixels wide where you can.
Transparency is preserved when the source is a PNG or WebP with an alpha channel and you download in the same format. The checkerboard behind the preview is the page showing you where the transparent pixels are, not part of the image.
Frequently asked questions
1280 by 720 pixels, 16:9, in JPG, PNG, GIF or WebP, and under 2 MB. YouTube will accept larger images at the same ratio and scale them down, but it will not accept a different ratio without adding bars. The preset here handles both the ratio and the final dimensions.
Cropping itself is lossless — the pixels you keep are the original pixels, untouched. Quality is only affected if you save as JPEG afterwards, which re-encodes them, or if the cropped region is then scaled up to reach a target size. Download as PNG or WebP to avoid the first, and crop generously to avoid the second.
The box on screen is a scaled preview so the whole image fits your display, but the number fields are always in original image pixels. A crop box that looks 400 pixels wide on screen may be 1600 actual pixels. The export always uses the real numbers.
Yes. Dragging works with touch, and the four number fields are there as a fallback because corner handles are fiddly on a small screen. The ratio presets are the easiest route on mobile — pick a ratio, drag the box roughly into place, and fine-tune with the fields.
No, the output is always rectangular. Circular profile pictures are made by the platform displaying a square image inside a circular mask, so cropping to 1:1 with your subject centred gives you exactly the right source image for that.