3 Ways To Crop Photos On a Mac

You can crop a photo using the tools that come with every Mac. If the photo is in the Photos app, you can use the cropping function in the editing tools there. If the photo is an independent file, you can use Preview or Markup Tools to crop it.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you three ways to crop photos on your Mac.
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So first we're going to look at a way to do this in the Photos app because most of us have our photos there. But then we'll look at how to crop an individual photo file using an app you already have on your Mac. Then we'll look at a way to do it without any app at all.  
Here I am in the Photos app and I'm going to double click on a photo to go to it. Then I'm going to click Edit. Now I could access the cropping tools by clicking Crop at the top. From here I can click and drag any corner I want and move that in. Then while I wait it will zoom in to just the portion I've selected and I can continue to drag around. I can always drag back out if I want as well. Once I've cropped a little bit I can click and drag to reposition the photo. Now I can also use some presets here under Aspect if I click the triangle next to it. I've got Original which will give me the original width and height ratio of the photo. Freeform allows me to do anything I want with the width and height. I can go to Square. Now notice when I go to one of these Iike Square when I drag the corner it going to stay square no matter where I move the cursor. I could choose 16 x 9 which is standard for TV's and some others here. I can even click Custom and then enter in my own ratio. When I'm finished with cropping I can click Done and now the photo appears to be cropped. Now keep in mind editing in Photos is always nondestructive. So I can always go to Edit and then Revert to Original to go back to the original size and get everything back from around the edges.
So what if you have a regular file. Like I've got one here on the Desktop. You can crop a file without bringing it into Photos by opening it up in Preview. It should be the default app if you double click it and it should open up in Preview. If not you can run Preview, it's on your Mac, and then open it from here or drag and drop this photo onto it. Or you can Control click and choose Open With and then choose Preview. Once you're in Preview you may even notice that under Tools there's a Crop option and it's grayed out. To crop you first need to select an area. So you can click and drag and choose a selection. Once you've selected something you could go to Tools, Crop, and then you get just that area. Now keep in mind in Preview, unlike in Photos, when you Save the changes are permanent. I'm going to Undo here and show you a slightly different way to get to the same thing. That's to click on the Markup Tools here. Once you do that you can click to Select. I'm going to choose a rectangular selection. Make the same selection and now I've got a Crop button here as well as the Crop command in the Tools menu. This gets me the same result. 
Now you can do this without even opening Preview. I'll show you first here in a Finder window. So I'm looking at the Desktop folder in the Finder but I could be looking anywhere. The Documents folder, in some folder I created, and I could be using any view. When I select the image I'm going to look on the right for the Preview pane. If you don't see it go to View, Show Preview. Then under that you'll see Quick Actions. You should see Markup. If you don't click More and then you can select Markup from that list. I use that and now I'm in Markup Tools which is very similar to what you see inside of Preview. But not exactly the same. Here there's a cropping tool. I can select it and now I can drag the corners kind of like in Photos. This is kind of a cross of between how it works in Preview and how it works in Photos. I get to where I want and then I can click the Crop button and now it's cropped to that size. But I could go back into the cropping tool and readjust if I need. Only after I click Done are the changes actually applied and you could see the photo changed there. 
Oh, and by the way, if you hold the Shift key down while you drag a corner it will lock the ratio of the crop to a square. This works in Preview and in Markup tools. If you do it in the Photos app using Freeform as the cropping option then it will lock to the current ratio.
You can get to the Markup Tool a bunch of different ways. Like for instance I can select the file here on the Desktop or in any Finder window, press the spacebar to bring up QuickLook and you could see I could click here at the top to go to Markup Tools. I could also Control click on the File and I should see the Quick Actions and then be able to go to Markup there as well. 
Now here's a bonus method that's going to use the Markup Tool but it's not going to permanently change the file. This works if you want to send a photo in an email. You can drag and drop the photo from a file or from the Photos app into a Mail message. When you do it it appears there. You can click the little button here at the upper right hand corner and choose Markup. Now once you're in Markup you can again crop. So I'm going to crop really close in here and click Crop and click Done and now you can see I've cropped really tightly on the photo here and I can send it. But notice something, the file, the original file hasn't changed. It's still the same. So this is a way to be able to attach a photo to an email, crop it, send the cropped version but not alter the version that's on your drive. 
Now, of course, if you have a third party image editing app like Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo or PhotoShop all of those tools allow you to crop as well. But these three methods allow you to do it with just the tools that everybody already has on their Mac.
3 Ways To Crop Photos On a Mac

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