Sometimes you might have a picture on your Chromebook that you want to crop in order to cut out something unsightly, remove some of the surroundings to put more focus on the subject, or perhaps change the shape of the image for a specific purpose.
So in this article, I’m going to show you how to crop a picture on a Chromebook.
Prefer to watch a video about how to crop a picture on a Chromebook? Click here.
How To Crop An Image On A Chromebook
To crop an image on your Chromebook, the first thing you’ll need to do is open it the way you normally would. So find your picture in the files app and double click on it to open it up.
Now, your picture will be open, and you’ll just need to click the “Crop and rotate” icon in the menu above it to begin cropping.
Now that you’re in cropping mode, you can begin cropping your image. There will be four blue dots on each corner of the image, and you can click and drag (or tap and drag on a touchscreen) any of those dots in any direction you want to crop the image.
So for example, if you wanted to cut the top off and turn it into a very short and wide image, you could drag one of the top two dots downwards and let go when it looks about right.
Or if you wanted to zoom right in on a specific part of the image and cut out the rest, you could drag one of the dots across and down at the same time to cut off the top and one of the sides.
It’s a little bit hard to explain how this all works with words and screenshots, so if you’re still a bit confused I would really recommend watching the video where I show you how it’s done live on camera, but hopefully, by now, you get the idea.
Cropping To A Specific Size
So that’s probably how you’ll crop pictures most of the time, but if you look at the menu down the right hand side of the screen, you’ll see it’s currently set to “Free”.
“Free” mode allows you to drag the corners any way you like and change the shape of the image until it looks exactly the way you want it to. And this is great most of the time, but sometimes you might want to crop the image into a specific shape for a specific purpose.
For example, if you click on “Square”…
The image will be cropped into a perfect square.
You will still be able to drag the corners to change the size of the square, and you can drag the image around so that the subject fits correctly inside the square, but it will make sure the image is cropped into a perfect square.
It doesn’t have to just be a square either, 16:9, 3:2, and 4:3 are all different shapes that you might want to use at one time or another.
You could also set it to “Original” if you just want to drag in one of the corners to zoom in on a specific part of the image but still keep the original shape.
As I said before, if you don’t care about the exact shape of the image and you just want to crop it however you want, you can leave it set to free and that will be fine for most purposes, but if you have a specific reason that you want to crop your image to a specific shape, that’s how it can be done.
Saving The Cropped Image
Now that you’ve finished cropping your image, all that’s left to do is save it. To do that, click the “Done” button in the top right hand corner…
And now you’ll be out of cropping mode, but it’s not quite saved yet. There are actually two different saving options.
There’s “Save” which will save the new cropped version as the original image which means you’ll no longer have the uncropped version of the image unless you have a copy of it saved somewhere else.
Or, there’s “Save As” which will leave the original image untouched and let you choose a new name and location for the new cropped version.
Save
If you’ve decided regular save is the way to go and you’re happy for the original image to be overwritten, all you need to do is click the “Save” button in the top right hand corner, and your image will be saved.
Now, if you close this window and go back to the files app, you’ll just have the one version of the image.
And if you open it up, it will be the cropped version!
Save As
But, if you want to use “Save As” to keep the original version of the image as well as the cropped version, you’ll just need to click the drop down arrow next to the “Save” button…
And then, in the menu that appears, click “Save as”.
Now, a files window will appear for you to save the cropped image. And before you save it, you’ll have to change either the name of the file or the location of the file (or both) because you can’t have two files with the same name in the same folder.
I would recommend just slightly changing the name of the cropped version of the image. So in this example, as the original was called Picture Of A Barn In Winter.jpg, I would change the name of the cropped version to something like Picture Of A Barn In Winter – Cropped.jpg.
This way, you can save the two images in the same location, and it will be obvious which one is which. But if you’d prefer to just save the image into a different folder, you could do that instead by just double clicking on the folder you want to save it in.
But, once you’ve changed either the name or the location of the cropped picture, you can go ahead and click the “Save” button to save it.
Now, your cropped image will be saved! And if you close this window and go back to the files app, you’ll see you have the original image and the cropped image.
Just keep in mind, if you have your files sorted by “Date modified”, and you have some other files in this folder, the two images might not be right next to each other because the cropped version was modified a few seconds ago and the original might have been modified a long time ago. But both the versions should be in there somewhere.
And that’s all there is to cropping a picture on a Chromebook! But if you want more Chromebook tutorials, you’ll find them all here.
