Crop an image to 16:9
What this tool does
This page opens with the 16:9 ratio locked, so the selection stays widescreen while you position it over the part of the picture you want to keep.
Pre-set for you: 16:9 aspect ratio. You can change it before you drop a file.
This browser cannot crop images locally. It needs Web Workers with
OffscreenCanvas support, and we will not fall back to encoding on the
main thread because that would freeze the page. Please try a current version of
Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari.
How this works
You drag the selection over the image, then the crop is drawn and re-encoded inside a Web Worker in this browser tab. The original file is never modified and never uploaded — cropping produces a new file for you to download.
- Pick an aspect ratio to keep the selection to a fixed shape, or leave it free and drag any rectangle.
- Rotate in 90° steps and flip across or down if the photo is the wrong way round. Rotating by a quarter turn swaps the output's width and height.
- The crop is applied at full resolution — the selection is a view of the pixels, not a downscale of them.
- Nothing is stored: reloading the page discards everything, including the selection.
16:9 is the shape of nearly every screen a picture is shown on: video players, slide decks, streaming thumbnails, widescreen monitors. If a photo has to sit in one of those frames without bars down the sides, it needs to be that shape, and the only way to get there from a taller original is to crop. This page starts with the ratio locked at 16:9 so the selection keeps that shape while you drag it.
With a ratio locked, dragging any corner or edge keeps the widescreen proportion and resizes the whole selection accordingly — you are choosing position and size, not shape. The alternative, freeform mode, lets you draw any rectangle and is the right choice when the destination has no fixed ratio at all.
What you are deciding when you crop is what leaves the frame. A 4:3 or 3:2 photograph cropped to 16:9 loses its top and bottom, which is usually the sky and the foreground; a portrait loses much more, since the widescreen frame is far wider than it is tall. If the important subject sits vertically — a standing figure, a tall building — check the preview before you commit, because the frame will not hold the whole thing.
The crop is taken from the original pixels rather than from the scaled-down preview. The editor fits the photo to your screen so it can be dragged comfortably, but the selection is translated back into source coordinates, so a 16:9 crop of a 4000 pixel image is a full-resolution 16:9 rectangle, not a screen-sized one.
A few things this tool does and one it does not:
- Rotate in quarter turns and flip horizontally or vertically, applied to the full-resolution result.
- Output as WebP by default, with JPEG and PNG available — JPEG is the safe pick for video editors, which sometimes still will not open WebP.
- No free-angle straightening, so a horizon that is slightly off level cannot be corrected here.
Your original is never modified, and dropping another image replaces the current one whenever you want to start again.
Frequently asked questions
Will cropping to 16:9 stretch my photo?
No. Cropping removes pixels outside the selection rather than distorting what is inside, so the parts you keep look exactly as they did.
How do I choose which part of the image to keep?
Drag the locked selection over the area you want. Because the ratio is fixed, the selection changes size and position but never becomes a different shape.
Is the cropped file full resolution?
Yes. The preview you drag on is scaled to your window, but the crop itself is calculated against the original image, so no detail is lost beyond what the crop removes.
Can I straighten a tilted horizon here?
Not at an arbitrary angle. The tool rotates in 90-degree steps only, so a photo that is slightly off level cannot be corrected in this editor.
Crop Image with different settings
Drag a selection over the image, or lock the aspect ratio and let it snap. The crop is applied in your browser tab, so the parts you cut out never leave your device either.