Image Cropper
Crop images with precision using intuitive drag-and-drop
Drop images here or click to upload
Drag-select for one image; aspect + anchor for many
100% Private: Your images are processed entirely in your browser. No data is ever uploaded to any server. Your files stay on your device.
Cropping edge cases: EXIF, aspect ratio, and what gets lost
The most common bug report for any browser crop tool is "the image came out sideways." The cause is EXIF orientation: iPhones (and most modern cameras) store the sensor's raw landscape pixels regardless of how the phone was held, plus an EXIF Orientation tag (values 1 through 8) that tells viewers how to rotate on display. Preview on macOS and Chrome auto-rotate; Canvas's drawImage historically did not, so a portrait phone shot cropped in the browser would come out as a rotated landscape. Chrome 81+ and Firefox 77+ fixed this when you load via <img>, but if you read the file bytes directly through FileReader, orientation can still be dropped. If your cropped output looks rotated, re-open the source in an app that respects EXIF (Preview, Photos) and re-export first.
Other edge cases this tool cannot work around:
- Aspect-ratio presets round to pixels. A 16:9 crop on a 1920-pixel-wide source targets 1080 pixels tall — but if you chose 1921 pixels wide (a drag by one pixel), the height rounds to 1080 and you're actually at 16.0083:9. Usually invisible, occasionally matters for video intermixing.
- All non-visual metadata is stripped. EXIF (camera, GPS, capture time), XMP (copyright, keywords), and ICC color profiles are all erased by
canvas.toBlob(). If you're cropping for photo archival, keep the original untouched and treat the cropped file as a derivative. - Very large sources silently fail. Safari's Canvas area limit is 16,777,216 pixels (about 4096×4096); see jhildenbiddle/canvas-size for a full browser matrix. A 48MP iPhone ProRAW at 8064×6048 exceeds that — it'll render blank or at reduced size on iOS.
- PNG transparency survives, JPEG doesn't. If you crop a PNG with transparent regions and export as JPEG, the transparent pixels fill with solid white — sometimes that's what you want, usually it's a surprise.
For anything where metadata or color accuracy matters (print prep, legal evidence, photojournalism), crop in a desktop tool that can preserve EXIF and ICC profiles — this tool is built for web and social output where stripping metadata is actually the safer default.