How do I crop a video online for free without uploading it?

Choose a video and a still frame appears with a bright box showing exactly what will be kept. Pick an aspect preset for a centred crop, or switch to Free and use the four edge sliders. Press Crop video to export an MP4. Nothing is uploaded at any point.

Which aspect ratio presets are available?

Five options: Free, Square 1:1 for Instagram feed posts, 16:9 for YouTube and widescreen, Vertical 9:16 for Reels, Shorts and TikTok, and 4:3 for classic presentations. 16:9 is selected by default, and every preset crops from the centre of the frame.

Can I choose which part of the frame a preset keeps?

No — presets always crop centred, taking equal amounts off opposite sides. If your subject is off to one side, or you need to remove something from one specific edge, use Free mode instead and set the edges yourself. That is the only way to control position.

How do the Free mode edge sliders work?

Four sliders trim a percentage off the left, right, top and bottom independently, each capped at 40 percent. That is the mode for cutting a taskbar off the bottom of a screen recording, removing a webcam overlay from a corner, or shaving a logo off one edge.

Is the preview box draggable?

No, it is a read-only preview. The bright rectangle shows what the current preset or slider values will keep, and it updates as you change them, but you cannot drag or resize it directly. The sliders are the control; the box is the confirmation.

Does cropping to 9:16 work on a landscape video?

It works, but understand what it does: a centred 9:16 crop of a 16 by 9 clip keeps only the middle sliver of the width and discards most of the frame. It is fine when your subject is dead centre, and poor otherwise. Shooting vertically is always better than cropping to vertical.

Does cropping reduce quality?

Cropping always re-encodes, because the frame dimensions change, so there is one generation of H.264 compression at CRF 21 with AAC audio. Pixels inside the kept region are not scaled or stretched, so nothing is distorted — you simply lose whatever fell outside the box.

What formats and file sizes are supported?

MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI and MKV up to 500MB, always exporting MP4 with H.264 and AAC. Clips with no audio track are handled automatically. A DRM-protected file may show no preview frame, though cropping can still succeed.

Crop Video

Crop a video with a live preview — square, vertical 9:16, 16:9 presets or free per-edge sliders, all on your device.

Files never leave your deviceInstant — no upload waitFree, no sign-up

Choose a video or drag & drop it hereMP4, MOV, WebM… cropped on your device, never uploaded

or import from

Crop a video to a social aspect ratio or trim specific edges away. A still frame shows a bright box marking exactly what survives before you commit, so there is no guessing. Runs entirely in your browser with FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly — no upload, no sign-up, no watermark, up to 500MB.

Two ways to crop, and they behave differently

This is the distinction to grasp before anything else, because picking the wrong one wastes an encode:

Aspect presets — 1:1, 16:9, 9:16 or 4:3, always cropped from the centre of the frame. Fast and correct for reframing between platforms, but you get no say in which part of the picture is kept.
Free mode — four sliders trimming the left, right, top and bottom independently, up to 40% each. This is the mode for removing something specific: a taskbar, a webcam bubble, a corner logo, a strip of empty ceiling.

The preview box is a read-only confirmation, not a draggable handle. It redraws as you change presets or sliders, and the darkened area is what gets discarded. In Free mode you must move at least one slider, and no pair of opposite edges may total 90% or more.

Which ratio for which platform

What each preset keeps from a 1920×1080 source.
Preset	Result from 1920×1080	Keeps	Typical use
16:9	1920×1080 — unchanged	Everything	Already widescreen; no crop needed
4:3	1440×1080	75% of the width	Presentations, older displays
1:1	1080×1080	56% of the width	Instagram feed posts, LinkedIn
9:16	≈606×1080	32% of the width	Reels, Shorts, TikTok
Free	Whatever you set	Up to 40% off each edge	Removing a specific element

That 9:16 row is the warning. Cropping a landscape clip to vertical throws away roughlytwo thirds of the width, centred — so anything happening off to the side is simply gone, and a presenter standing left of frame ends up half out of shot. It works when the subject is centred and badly otherwise. Filming vertically in the first place always beats cropping to vertical afterwards.

Cropping is not resizing

They get confused constantly and do different jobs. Cropping changes what is in the frameby cutting pixels away — the ones that remain keep their original size, so nothing is stretched or softened. Resizing changes the pixel dimensions of the whole picture while keeping all of the content.

So cropping a 1920×1080 clip to 1:1 gives you a genuine 1080×1080 video at full detail, not a shrunken one. If the file is too large, that is a job for resize video or thevideo compressor — cropping reduces size only as a side effect of having fewer pixels.

What happens during the encode

Because the frame dimensions change, cropping always re-encodes: FFmpeg's crop filter picks the region, output dimensions are rounded to even numbers as H.264 requires, and the result is written as MP4 with H.264 video at CRF 21 and AAC audio at 128 kbps. That is one generation of compression, visually hard to spot on normal viewing.

Silent clips are handled without you having to think about it — if there is no audio track the encode is retried without one rather than failing. Expect roughly real-time speed, since encoding runs ona single CPU thread with no GPU acceleration, and the engine is about31MB to download on first use.

How this compares to the alternatives

Cropping one clip, three ways.
	ToolJiffy	Typical online cropper	Desktop editor
Video uploaded to a server	No	Yes	No
Sign-up	No	Often to export	Install or licence
File-size limit	500MB	Commonly capped free	None practical
Watermark	Never	Common on free tiers	No
Preview before encoding	Yes — still frame with the kept box	Varies	Yes
Off-centre preset crops	No — use Free mode	Sometimes	Yes
Price	Free, unlimited	Free tier then paid	Free to paid

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I crop a video online for free without uploading it?
Choose a video and a still frame appears with a bright box showing exactly what will be kept. Pick an aspect preset for a centred crop, or switch to Free and use the four edge sliders. Press Crop video to export an MP4. Nothing is uploaded at any point.
Which aspect ratio presets are available?
Five options: Free, Square 1:1 for Instagram feed posts, 16:9 for YouTube and widescreen, Vertical 9:16 for Reels, Shorts and TikTok, and 4:3 for classic presentations. 16:9 is selected by default, and every preset crops from the centre of the frame.
Can I choose which part of the frame a preset keeps?
No — presets always crop centred, taking equal amounts off opposite sides. If your subject is off to one side, or you need to remove something from one specific edge, use Free mode instead and set the edges yourself. That is the only way to control position.
How do the Free mode edge sliders work?
Four sliders trim a percentage off the left, right, top and bottom independently, each capped at 40 percent. That is the mode for cutting a taskbar off the bottom of a screen recording, removing a webcam overlay from a corner, or shaving a logo off one edge.
Is the preview box draggable?
No, it is a read-only preview. The bright rectangle shows what the current preset or slider values will keep, and it updates as you change them, but you cannot drag or resize it directly. The sliders are the control; the box is the confirmation.
Does cropping to 9:16 work on a landscape video?
It works, but understand what it does: a centred 9:16 crop of a 16 by 9 clip keeps only the middle sliver of the width and discards most of the frame. It is fine when your subject is dead centre, and poor otherwise. Shooting vertically is always better than cropping to vertical.
Does cropping reduce quality?
Cropping always re-encodes, because the frame dimensions change, so there is one generation of H.264 compression at CRF 21 with AAC audio. Pixels inside the kept region are not scaled or stretched, so nothing is distorted — you simply lose whatever fell outside the box.
What formats and file sizes are supported?
MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI and MKV up to 500MB, always exporting MP4 with H.264 and AAC. Clips with no audio track are handled automatically. A DRM-protected file may show no preview frame, though cropping can still succeed.