10 Tips For Cropping In the Mac Photos App

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using the Cropping Tool in Photos on your Mac. 

One of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your photos is to crop them. You can be doing this to get rid of things around the edges or to focus or zoom in on a specific portion of a photo. Using the Cropping Tool in the Photos App is pretty simple. You would typically go to Edit a photo, like let's say this one here. I'll just double click on it and you're viewing it. You can click Edit to edit. One of the tools here at the top is Crop.

My first tip is you can jump right to the Cropping Tool from the view of the photo, like this. All you need to do is press the C key. You don't even need a modifier like Command. Just C and it will go into editing mode and right to Crop. Now once you're here you want to probably crop out a little bit, or zoom in on the photo. There are three main ways to do this. One is to grab either a corner or an edge and drag that. That holds the opposite corner or edge steady and brings in the rest of it. So you can crop out, say, the top and right by grabbing the top right corner and dragging in. 

But most of the time we want to start by focusing on the center of the photo. If you hold the Option Key down, then dragging a corner or an edge will also drag the opposite side. So, for instance, if I Option drag the top right corner you can see how it is bringing all the edges in.

Now there's another way to crop in to what's here in the middle. That only works if you've got a Magic Trackpad. If you've got that, and most Mac users do because MacBooks, of course, have them. You can simply use two fingers and you can put them both on the trackpad and move them in or out. This will zoom in when you move your fingers apart or back out when you move your fingers together. It makes it really easy to quickly zoom on the middle of the photo.

Now, whenever you're cropping how the crop works really depends on the Aspect here. So, for instance, if you've got an original it's going to take the original width and height, and no matter what you're doing here, liking dragging a side or corner, it's going to keep the ration the same. So you can see the width and height follow the same ratio. You can use anyone of these, like 16 by 8, or 4 by 5, and it will snap to those and then it will maintain that ratio when you're dragging a side or a corner. You can use Original to follow the original ratio of your photo. For instance for my camera here the original is 3 by 2. You can notice if I choose original or 3 by 2 you don't see any change there because that is the original ratio. You can also use Custom here, set your own ration to anything you want, and note that if you choose a ration like 4 by 3, if you want it to be 3 by 4 vertical you can just click the Vertical Icon here or Horizontal to go back. Of course Square is 1 by 1. It's a square ration which is very useful for a lot of social media posting. Once you've got it set with one of these, anything you do, any zooming or grabbing of the sides is not going to break out of that ratio. If you do want to break out of that ratio, what you want is not any one of these, but this special one here, Freeform. When you use Freeform you can grab any side or corner and change the ratio to be anything you want, like this.

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 3000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon.

Once you've cropped you've got extra bits of the photo above, to the sides, and below perhaps and you may want to actually reposition the picture. After cropping you can click and drag here in the middle and drag the photo around. The crop stays the same but you could reposition the photo inside that. So, let's reset here. When it is all at the original ratio and it's not cropped at all you can't drag it around at all because there is no extra photo along any edge. But, if you were to zoom in a little, let's use two fingers on the trackpad and move them apart, now you've got this extra bit here on the outside. So you can actually move this around to reposition the photo. So in other words there's a variety of different ways of working with the photo to actually get the portion that you want inside of a frame the size that you want.

Now you may be wondering what's with this grid here. You can see when I move the photo around I get this grid that divides up the photo into nine different spaces. This is actually a grid that is for the Rule of Thirds. Now if you've ever taken a basic photography course or a class or read about photography probably the Rule Of Thirds was brought up. If not you can read this WiKipedia page here or any book on photography will tell you about it. It basically says that a good rule of thumb is to position important parts of your photo at the intersections here when you divide a photo in thirds vertically and horizontally. So, for instance, for this photo here I may want to zoom in and position kind of the base of this tree right at one of these points and the house at another one of these points. It's not always easy to get more than one item there, like that, but it definitely makes a better photo than the original, which had too much sky. Jack's in the middle of this photo here. But if I were to use the cropping tool and kind of move him so the center of his head is right here on this point, it creates a nicer photo.

Now you may have noticed at the top of the cropping tools there are three sliders here. These are Straighten, Vertical, and Horizontal. Straighten is another way of saying rotate. A lot of times people ask me how can you rotate just by, you know, a few degrees a photo. There doesn't seem to be a tool for that. That's because they don't notice there is Straighten there and that's technically the same thing. If you drag this left or right you can see it rotates the photo. Now it does everything it needs to do to make sure there are no blank spots inside of the frame. So you can see it's zooming in a little bit to capture the corners just right. So it is going to do that but you can use this when a photo isn't straight. In this case it is kind of obvious. The bank here isn't straight there so I can rotate it a little bit with the Straighten Tool, like that, to fix the problem with the photo.

The Vertical and Horizontal sliders are perspective. So you can use these to basically tilt the photo toward you or away from you, which can help. Especially I like to use it when I've taken a photo way down at street level at something that is high up just to make it look a little less obvious that I was standing really low compared to the object. But you can also use it to straighten things out in one direction or the other if things are at a stage angle. It is best to use these as little as possible. But only a little bit can actually help improve a photo caught at an odd angle.

Now if you're not quite sure the best way to crop something or use any of these tools there is an Auto Button. So we'll go into the cropping tool here for this and I can use the Auto Button at the bottom and you can see it automatically straightens out this photo. No problem here. It was easy for it to see what the issue was. But a lot of times you use the Auto Tool and nothing happens at all, meaning it couldn't find any reason to adjust any of these or crop the photo. It is worth giving it a try especially if you're in a rush and have a lot of photos to crop, use the Auto Tool first and then adjust from there.

Now here's a very important thing to know about cropping. Just like with the other types of adjustments or edits you can make it is non-destructive in Photos. So if I were to take this photo here and I just want to use it like this for a project, so I crop it and I'm done, I haven't removed all of the parts of the photo that are there. I haven't permanently changed the photo. It stays like this and it will look like this as I flip through my Photos Library here, go in and make other changes or edits, print it, export it, all of that. But I still have the original. The Photos App is a non-destructive editor. It always keeps the original. If I go into Edit here you'll see I've got a Revert To Original button. That will undo things like brightness adjustments, and such. But also undoes cropping. So I can use Revert To Original and I can see I had my original there saved properly in my library the whole time.

You can also go to Image, Revert To Original there in the menu. You can even do that at the top level here. So after you make adjustments you can select, say, a bunch of photos and if you want to take them all back to the original state before you made any changes you can. That means you can crop like you want for exporting now knowing you can go back to the original photo and try another crop later on. It really gives you the freedom to experiment and play around with all of the editing adjustments.

Now I want to give you two extra ones that have to do with cropping multiple photos at the same time because it's all good just to crop one photo but what if you have to crop a lot of them. So one thing you should know is when you go into a photo, like this, and then we'll just use C here to crop you can make an adjustment here. So, I'll crop like this and I don't have to exit this and then go into the next photo to crop that one while I'm in the cropping tool. If I just use the right arrow on my keyboard it goes to the next photo in my library and you can see I'm in the cropping tool for that as well. So I can just keep flipping through my photos and crop each one. Go back and forth with the left and right arrows. I could also go to View, Show Thumbnails, and I get thumbnails here at the bottom. I could jump right to any photo I want pretty quickly by just swiping left and right in here and selecting a photo to jump to it. It will keep me in whatever editing tool I'm currently using. So you could crop, crop, crop photo to photo very quickly.

But a lot of times the reason we want to crop is because we want photos to be even, to be the same ratio as each other. Maybe to use in a project, like a presentation, put them in a Pages document, or make a collage. There is a trick you can use to reapply a crop across multiple photos. So let's go into this one here and, say, that we want to have a square version of this. So I'll click square here and it doesn't matter what you adjust this to. I can adjust this like that. What's going to be saved and used in other photos is the Aspect Ratio. So square in this case but it could be something I created myself with Custom or Freeform. Now with this here all done I can actually select that photo, go to Image, and then I can Copy Edits. Then it is going to give me a list of the things I've changed. In this case only Crop and I can say yes I want to copy the crop. It's not going to remember exactly the portion of the photo that's taken in the crop but it's going to remember the ratio. So now I can go from this photo and I'll Shift Click to select all of these. I can go to Image and I can Paste Edits. It's going to crop all of those making them all square. Now I can use them in some sort of project and they'll all be even. There won't be one that's an odd size or one that's vertical, like that. Of course I can still go in to each of these individually and I can crop them in here so I can make adjustments to each one if I need to. But at least it makes it easy to assign the same ratio to a bunch of photos at once.

So practice cropping some of your photos in the Photos App. Sometimes a crop is all you really need to take a mediocre photo and make it one of your best ones. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.