How to crop an image
- Tap Choose a photo to crop and pick a JPG, PNG or WebP from your phone or computer.
- Drag the four corner handles until the bright rectangle holds only the part you want.
- Tap a shape — 1:1, 4:3, 16:9 — if a form or a platform has asked you for one.
- Tap Crop photo, check the thumbnail, then tap Save the file.
What the bright rectangle keeps
Everything inside the rectangle survives and everything under the dimmed surround is discarded. The four corner handles are drawn small so they do not cover the corner you are trying to see, but each one carries a 44-pixel target around it, which is what a thumb actually needs. Pinch-to-zoom still works everywhere else on the page: the gesture is only taken over the photo itself, never over the page, because a tool that switches zoom off to get its own dragging working has made itself unusable for anybody who needs to magnify text.
The rectangle is measured against the picture the way you are looking at it. A photo your phone stored sideways, with an orientation tag telling the viewer to turn it, is turned upright before the crop is applied — so the region you chose is the region you get. Ignoring that tag is the single most common way a crop tool goes wrong, and it is permanent, because re-encoding the file throws the tag away and there is nothing left to correct it with.
Cropping is the cheapest way to meet a size limit
Fewer pixels take fewer bytes at the same quality. If a portal is rejecting your photo for being over 50 KB, cropping tightly around the subject usually does more for the file size than turning the quality down does, and it does far less visible damage to a face. Crop first, then compress.
The result is re-encoded once, in the format you started with: a JPEG comes back a JPEG, a PNG comes back a PNG, and the new file is saved beside the old name with -cropped on the end. One useful side effect of that re-encode is that the camera metadata does not travel with it, so the location tag your phone wrote into the original is not in the copy you upload.