It’s not uncommon to look back at photos and wish you could reframe them. Or maybe there’s something on the edge of a photo that you wish wasn’t there. The good news is that it’s incredibly easy to crop an image using just your iPhone. Keep reading to see just how effortless it is to use your iPhone to crop or resize your pictures.
First, let’s take a step back in case you’re not familiar with what it means to crop a photo. Cropping means cutting off a side or edge of your picture. Usually, this involves trying to maintain a specific aspect ratio like 4:3 or 1:1. But sometimes, you might just want to cut something or someone out of your image. Or maybe you want your picture to be a particular shape.
For most of this article, you’ll learn how to do these things in the native Photos app on your iPhone. But for a few of the more unique methods described in this article, you’ll need a third-party app. We’ll cover these in the relevant sections.
If you want your picture to maintain a specific shape, you can crop it using the Photos by following these steps:
Maybe you just want to cut out an object on the side of one of your images and don’t care about preserving the aspect ratio. Here’s what you need to do:
If you want to crop photos into a circle, you’ll need to use a third-party app to help you out. For this section, we’ll be using Adobe Photoshop Mix, which you can download from the App Store.
Once you have the app downloaded on your phone, follow these instructions:
Sometimes you might wish your photo was just a little bit bigger around the edges, so you can have more negative space in your shot. And believe it or not, there’s an app that can help you do that. For this section, we’ll show you how to use Snapseed’s Expand feature. There are three options. You can choose to add a black frame, add a white frame, or use the Smart background, which tries to replicate the edges of your image to extend it. This feature works better on some photos than on others, so you might need to play with it a bit.
Here’s how you enlarge your photos with Snapseed:
From time to time, you may run into an issue where your phone won’t allow you to crop pictures. Some of the common problems and solutions are:
While cropping an image does technically change the size of it, the process isn’t the same as resizing a photo. An aspect ratio is usually used to measure a photo crop, but the photo size is measured in its pixels. And, just like the photo cropping process, you can do all of the image resizing directly on your iPhone.
There are a handful of third-party apps that will display the photo size of your pictures. For this section, we’ll show you how to view that detailed info using Google Photos:
Sometimes, uploading pictures to websites or apps requires that they adhere to specific photo size guidelines. So if you want to reduce the size of your pictures, you can use the aptly named Image Size app. Once you have the app downloaded to your phone, here’s how to resize a picture:
Maybe you want your photo to have a different aspect ratio but still want to be able to see the complete picture. Although this process is a little more involved, it can still be done on your iPhone. It’s especially helpful if you already know the size you want your photo to be.
For this, you’ll want to use Adobe’s Photoshop Mix app again. Follow these steps:
It’s common knowledge that your iPhone is capable of taking incredible and stunning photos. But hopefully, after reading this article, you’ve learned that you can also use your iPhone to crop and resize your images to get you the exact frame you were hoping to capture. There’s no longer any need to waste time sending your pictures over to a computer to do that. Your iPhone can do it all on its own.