Below, you’ll learn how to crop photos on a PC or Mac using your computer’s respective built-in photo editing program. You’ll also learn how to crop photos on a mobile device using a free photo editing app. It’s easy, fast and actually pretty fun once you get the hang of it.
Crop a Photo as a Rectangle on Your PC
If you’re a PC user running on Microsoft Windows, you can use a built-in program called Microsoft Paint to do your cropping.
Crop a Photo as a Freeform Selection on Your PC
As an alternative to rectangular cropping, Paint also has an option for free-form crop selections. So if you wanted to crop out the entire background of the photo in the example above, you could slowly trace around the flower using the free-form crop selection to do it. If you want to start over, simply click anywhere on the photo and the crop outline will disappear. When you’re happy with your crop outline, select Crop in the top menu to finish the cropping. To use the free-form crop selection, do the following:
Crop a Photo as a Rectangle on Your Mac
If you’re a Mac user, you’ll have a program called Photos installed on your machine that allows you to do your cropping. To access it, do the following:
Crop a Photo Into a Circle on Your Mac
Using Preview, you can crop a photo in a circle, rectangle, and even free-form. Here’s how to use Preview to crop a photo in a circle:
Crop a Photo on Your iOS or Android Device
To crop photos on your mobile device, you can take advantage of countless free photo editing apps out there, but for the sake of keeping things simple, we’ll use Adobe’s Photoshop Express app. It’s free to download and use on iOS, Android and Windows devices, and no — you don’t need to have an Adobe ID to use it. Once you’ve downloaded the app and opened it, you’ll be asked to give it permission to access your photos. After you do, the app will show you all your most recent photos stored on your device.
