Two ways to make an image square
- Crop to a square. The box is locked to 1:1. Move it to choose which part stays. The rest of the picture is cut away.
- Keep the whole picture. Switch on Add a background instead of cropping. The picture is placed in the middle of a square canvas, and the empty space is filled with the colour you choose. Nothing is cut off, which is what you want for a logo, a product photo or a wide picture that must not lose its edges.
When to use which
- Profile pictures and avatars are usually cropped, with the face in the middle of the box.
- Product photos and logos are often padded, so that the whole item stays visible.
- Square posts for social media can be either, depending on whether the edges matter.
Square sizes
Keep crop size saves the pixels of the box as they are. For a fixed size, choose 400, 800 or 1080 pixels, or type your own width in Resize output width. A larger square is better for printing, and a smaller one loads faster on a web page. For more square sizes, see crop to 1:1.
Related tools
Use the Instagram crop tool for posts and stories, the free-shape image cropper for other ratios, or the image resizer to change the size without cropping.