Photo cropping without quality loss

With ordinary online croppers it does: they decode the JPEG to pixels and compress it again, adding a second generation of artefacts. Here JPEG has a no-re-encoding mode — the file is cut along its block grid and the compression coefficients are copied unchanged, so the part you kept stays exactly as it was. PNG and lossless WebP are saved without loss anyway.

A JPEG is stored in blocks of 8 or 16 pixels, and it can only be cut on those block boundaries without recompression. The tool moves the left and top edges outwards — by at most 15 px — and says exactly by how much. Nothing you selected is lost: the crop simply becomes slightly larger. If you need pixel-exact edges, turn the no-re-encoding option off.

Switch the frame shape to the circle next to the “Frame” heading. The frame snaps to a square, the preview shows the actual circle rather than a square standing in for it, and the file is saved as a PNG with a transparent background — so it can go straight on as a profile picture or sit on a coloured background with no white corners. A rounded-corner shape sits next to it as the in-between option.

In “Output size” pick “For print, cm”, type the width and height in centimetres and choose the print density. The tool converts that to pixels and shows the result: 10 × 15 cm at 300 dpi is 1181 × 1772 px. If the source does not have enough pixels and the picture would have to be stretched, you are told before saving rather than after printing.

It measures the direction of every strong edge in the shot and adds up their votes: horizontals and verticals of the same crooked scene point at the same angle. The angle it finds goes onto the tilt slider, where you can still adjust it by hand. If there is no dominant direction — foliage, clouds, water — it tells you the tilt could not be measured instead of rotating the frame by a number it made up.

Yes: drop several files in, set the frame, and it carries over to the rest proportionally. For a set of different shots switch on “Its own frame for every photo”: the frame of the chosen ratio is then placed on each picture by its own subject and faces. Results can be written straight into a folder on disk, and in that lane the batch size is not limited by archive memory at all.

Switch to “Split” and set the number of columns and rows — the preview immediately shows the cut lines and tile numbers. The remainder of the division is spread across the tiles, so the last column and row are not shaved off. The “Number them for a social feed” box renumbers the files in posting order: a feed shows the newest post at the top left, so you post from the bottom-right corner of the picture, file 01 first. A note with the same order is saved alongside the tiles.

Yes. In “Poster” mode set the poster width in centimetres, the sheet size, the printer margins and the glue overlap — the tool works out how many sheets are needed, lays the picture across them and adds cut guides and a label on every sheet. The resulting print resolution is shown alongside: below 100 dpi the picture will look soft, and you are warned before printing rather than after.

When JPEG is cropped without re-encoding, the ICC colour profile and the metadata are carried into the finished file and the EXIF pixel dimensions are updated. The EXIF rotation is taken into account beforehand, so a phone photo is cut exactly where you selected rather than in a rotated copy.

JPG and JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, plus HEIC and HEIF — iPhone shots open without converting them first. The no-re-encoding crop applies to JPEG; other formats are saved by redrawing the frame.