Crop a video, without uploading it

What the new file holds

The tool draws only the pixels inside your box into a new video and encodes that. Everything outside the box is gone from the new file; there is nothing in it that a player or an editor could bring back.

That is not true of every cropped video. H.264 video, for example, can carry crop values that tell a player to hide the edges of each frame while the hidden pixels stay in the file, and FFmpeg can write those values without encoding the video again (FFmpeg). A crop made that way can be undone by anyone who ignores the values. The files made here have no such values, and no location, date or device details either. Our guide on whether someone can uncrop a video you send covers the other ways the cut-off part can travel with a video.

Crop shapes and sizes

Pick a shape and press Largest box to get the biggest box of that shape that fits your video. For a 1920 x 1080 video, or a 1080 x 1920 phone video for 16:9, that is:

Pixel sizes are rounded to even numbers, because H.264 video needs them. These are our own calculations; the tool shows the exact size of your crop as you move the box. The box stays where you put it for the whole video, so place it where the action stays.

Same pixels, or 1080p?

Same pixels as the crop saves exactly the pixels inside your box. Nothing is enlarged, so the file is as sharp as the original allows and as small as it can be.

1080p and 720p resize the crop so its short side is 1080 or 720 pixels. Enlarging a small crop does not add any detail, but it gives apps the size they expect. YouTube, for example, takes Shorts at up to 1080p (YouTube Help), so a 9:16 crop saved at 1080 x 1920 uses all of it.

Either way the new picture is H.264, and its bitrate follows the bits your original spends on each pixel. Saved at the same pixels, a crop that keeps half of an H.264 original comes out at about half its bitrate, so the file shrinks with the crop. An HEVC original, the iPhone's High Efficiency format, gets about 1.5 times its bits for each pixel, because H.264 needs more of them for the same quality. AAC or MP3 sound goes into the new file untouched.

Cropping on iPhone and Android, and cropping here

Phone gallery apps can crop videos too. The Photos app on an iPhone crops a video by its corners or to a preset such as Square, Wallpaper, 9:16 or 5:7, and an edit you saved can be undone later with Revert (Apple). Google Photos on Android crops a video to another aspect ratio, such as square, and Save keeps a copy with your edits (Google). Because a crop in Photos can be reverted, some ways of sharing it can carry the full frame, as our guide to sending cropped videos explains.

This page runs in the browser on a phone as well as on a computer, with no app to install. It makes a new file with only the pixels you keep, at the size you choose, and never changes the video on your device. It also lets you set the crop to the exact pixel, and crop and trim in one go with Use only part of the video.

Big videos: 500 MB, 1 GB and more

Opening a big video costs nothing extra here. Since it is never uploaded, no upload limit applies; the browser reads the parts it needs from your device as it goes. The size that counts is the cropped file, which the panel shows before you start. A smaller box or 720p makes it smaller.

Cropped files of up to about 500 MB on a computer, or about 200 MB on a phone or tablet, are built in memory and then downloaded. Chrome and Edge on a computer save a bigger one straight into a file you choose. Other browsers hold it in memory, which a phone may not manage; the tool warns you first, and a shorter part with Use only part of the video always fits.

Speed and browsers

Cropping encodes every frame again. In our tests on a laptop, a 9:16 crop of a 20 second 1080p video took 2 to 4 seconds in Chrome and Edge. A phone can take longer; the progress bar shows the time left.

Cropping needs WebCodecs, the decoder and encoder inside the browser. caniuse lists it for Chrome and Edge 94 or later, Samsung Internet 17 or later, Firefox 130 or later on a computer, and in full for Safari 26 or later (caniuse). An iPhone video in HEVC, the High Efficiency format (Apple), also needs a browser that decodes HEVC; on our Windows laptop Chrome did and Edge did not. Where a browser cannot, the tool says so before anything runs.