Social Media Crop Tool

Where each crop ends up

Seven distinct shapes sit behind the preset pills, and several presets share one. Tick Fit to recommended size and the export is downscaled so the long edge lands on that preset's number — but only if your crop is already bigger than it. Crop a small photo and the checkbox does nothing, because the tool will not enlarge to hit a target.

1 : 1 — Instagram Feed Square

The long edge caps at 1080 px, so a fitted export is 1080 × 1080. It is the shape with the least to go wrong and the most to lose: a square carries no vertical real estate on a phone, and Instagram's profile grid has displayed thumbnails at 3 : 4 rather than square since the 2025 grid change (checked July 2026). A 1080 px square in a 3 : 4 cell keeps only 810 px of its width — 135 px off each side, gone from the grid while the full square still shows in the feed.

4 : 5 — Instagram Feed Portrait

Long edge 1350, so 1080 × 1350 fitted. This is the tallest shape a still post gets in the feed, which is the whole argument for it. Against the 3 : 4 grid the arithmetic is gentle: 1350 px of height in a 3 : 4 cell keeps 1012.5 px of width, so you lose about 67 px total — roughly 34 px off each side. Frame it so nothing you care about lives in that outer sliver and the same file works whole in the feed and cropped in the grid.

9 : 16 — Instagram Story/Reel, TikTok Video, TikTok Cover

Three presets, one ratio, two different export sizes. Story/Reel and TikTok Video both cap at 1920 px, giving a clean 1080 × 1920. TikTok Cover caps at 1080, and because the long edge of a 9 : 16 frame is its height, that produces 608 × 1080 — the width lands on 607.5 and rounds up. Vertical fills a phone screen edge to edge, which is exactly why the top and bottom of the frame are the least safe parts of any image you put in it: that is where the app's own furniture sits. Compose for the middle and treat the ends as bleed.

1.91 : 1 — Instagram Landscape, Facebook Post

The awkward one, and worth knowing precisely. Instagram Landscape caps the long edge at 1080, so a fitted export is 1080 × 565. Facebook Post caps at 1200 and gives 1200 × 628 — two pixels shy of the 1200 × 630 in the table above, because 1200 ÷ 1.91 is 628.27 and the ratio, not the round number, is what the crop frame locks to. Neither platform will reject you over two pixels; it just shows what the tool actually guarantees, which is the shape.

2 : 3 — Pinterest Standard Pin

Long edge 1500, so 1000 × 1500. Pinterest's own guidance has settled on 2 : 3 as the recommended pin shape (checked July 2026), and it is the ratio the vertical feed is built around. If you are cropping a product photo down to it from a square original you are throwing away a third of your width, so it pays to shoot or generate the tall version rather than rescue one.

1 : 2.1 — Pinterest Long Pin

Long edge 2100, so 1000 × 2100. The tallest thing the tool will make, and the only preset whose ratio is not a tidy pair of integers — the frame locks to 1 : 2.1 exactly, so the readout under the preview shows the decimal rather than pretending it reduces. Long pins suit stacked content: a step sequence, a before-and-after, a list graphic. They suit a single photograph badly, because a 2.1 : 1 tall slice of most photographs is a corridor.

16 : 9 — YouTube Thumbnail, X/Twitter Post

Two presets, same shape, different caps: YouTube fits to 1280 × 720 and X to 1600 × 900. 1280 × 720 is the size YouTube's own thumbnail guidance names, with 640 px of width as the practical floor (checked July 2026). The geometry that matters for a thumbnail is the bottom-right corner, where the duration badge sits over your image — a fact of the player, not of your file, so leave that corner quiet.

Framing for a crop you don't control

The hard part of cropping for social is not the crop you make here. It is the second crop, the one a platform applies afterwards to fit your picture into a grid cell, a preview card or a recommendation rail — a crop you cannot configure and usually cannot see before you post. The way through it is to stop thinking about one output shape and start thinking about the overlap between all the shapes you plan to export. Match the widths and the arithmetic gets easy: at 1080 px wide, a 1 : 1 crop is 1080 tall, a 4 : 5 is 1350 and a 9 : 16 is 1920. The common ground is the centre 1080 × 1080. Put your subject inside that square and all three exports contain it; hang the subject near the bottom of the vertical and the square loses it entirely.

Text and logos need more margin than subjects do, because a subject that is slightly clipped still reads and a word that is slightly clipped does not. The outer eighth of the frame is a reasonable no-go band — 135 px on a 1080 px edge — and it absorbs both the platform re-crop and the interface furniture that overlays vertical formats. It is deliberately more generous than a print bleed allowance, because a grid crop can take a tenth of your frame in one go with no preview.

When you have to pick one master, export the tallest ratio you need and crop down from it rather than the other way round. Cropping down discards pixels you have; cropping up needs pixels you never captured, and the only ways to get them are to upscale or to pad. This tool deliberately refuses both — the crop box is clamped to the edges of your image, the smallest crop it accepts is 20 px of natural resolution, and Fit to recommended size only ever shrinks. Use what is on screen while you frame: the area outside the crop box is dimmed under a 60 % black scrim so you can see what you are about to throw away, the Rule of thirds checkbox lays two lines each way at 33.3 % and 66.7 % with a dot at each intersection, and the readout shows the exact output pixels and current ratio as you drag. Rotate ratio swaps width and height on a locked preset — the fast way to test whether a composition survives being turned on its side.