Cropping Photos on Your Mac in the Photos App

Learn how to use the cropping tools in the Photos app. You can crop to any part of the photo, or stick with specific aspect ratios. You can also rotate and adjust the perspective of a photo.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use the Cropping Tools in Mac Photos.
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So one of the fundamental things you may need to do with photos in the Photos App is crop them. Let's choose an example photo like this one. Say we want to get to the Cropping Tool. Cropping Tool is one of many Edit tools available here. First you want to enter the Edit mode. Click the Edit button here at the top right hand corner. You could also use the keyboard shortcut. Under image you'll see Show Edit Tools. The keyboard shortcut there is just the Return Key. So we'll use the Return and we're in editing mode. Now you'll see there are several different modes inside this, Adjust, Filters, and Crop. I can click here to enter the Cropping Mode. The keyboard shortcut is just to press C at this point. Now you're in Cropping Tools here and you'll see them here on the right. 
The basics are you've got this box with these four corners here that you can now drag to crop the photo. So, for instance, if I want to crop out some of the bottom left I can drag the corner here and you can see as I drag what the crop will look like. I can release and it will then recenter and resize the photo so now I just see the cropped area. I can continue to crop it more like that. If I want to crop back out I can simply drag in the opposite direction and kind of push against the edge of the window and it will come back out to include more of the photo. Then wait a second and you can see it resizes and recenters. You can also drag the edges like this to crop. If you hold the Option key down and drag one of the corners then all four corners move in and out together like that. Other modifier keys do other things. For instance if you grab a side and Shift key down notice how the top and bottom will change along with the side you're dragging but the opposite side will stay in the same place. If you hold the Option key will dragging a side then the opposite side will drag along with it. 
Now let's say you Crop a photo to get to be about the right size. But you don't have quite the right part of the photo in there. Instead of recropping everything simply click and drag in the middle of the photo and the crop stays the same but what part of the photo it is showing will change. Another thing you could do when you're in the middle of cropping is on a trackpad use two-fingers to pinch in or out to zoom in or out on the photo. 
Now chances are when you're actually dragging a corner you're going to end up with a non-standard width and height ratio, which may be fine for a lot of uses. But if you wanted to stick with something standard you can use the Aspect Menu here. For instance you can choose Square and you get a perfect square where the width and height are equal. So at that point you can zoom in and out and drag around to get your photo to fit within that square. You could also, of course, hold the Option key and drag the corner and it will stay as a square. You could use other ratios as well. For instance the standard for video is 16 x 9. So if you're planning on using this photo maybe in an iMovie project you may want to crop it to this ahead of time to get it perfect before you import it. Then you have other sizes here that are good for printing. For instance if you're using a photo printer or sending them somewhere online to be printed and you want to do a 5 x 7, there's a 5 x 7 ratio or a 4 x 3 ratio. 
You can also choose Custom here and then type your own ratio amount. If you ever want to return to the actual ratio that was used in the original photo click Original. It will go back to that ratio and you can use the Option key to stick to the ratio and get to a smaller size and crop some other portion of what's in here. Also note that for any of these ratios you can switch from horizontal to vertical here at the bottom. So, for instance, you could do a 5 x 7 and then switch to a vertical 5 x 7 or 7 x 5.
You have other options here that are bundled in with Crop. One is Straighten which used to be called rotate. Basically you can drag this line back and forth to rotate the photo. It will zoom in and out to make sure that there is always something within the cropping area. There's no blank spaces. So if you want you can zoom in ahead of time, like that, and then you see if you straighten it doesn't need to do that because there is plenty of image to fit around the corners. As you straighten you get these lines here so you can really, kind of, align up something like the horizon to one of these horizontal lines. 
Also down here at the bottom you'll notice an Auto Setting. Auto will automatically straighten the image based on some camera information and maybe if it can see the horizon. Use that here and you can see how it straightens out that line right there that it finds. Also notice there's a Reset button right next to it. So no matter what you do here or how you may crop things if you use this Reset button it resets all the cropping back to the original. There's also this Flip Tool here which will flip the image like that. If you ever need to flip vertical hold the Option key down and then you can do a vertical flip. You'll also have the vertical and horizontal perspective changes here which can be use in interesting ways. Like, for instance, take this selfie here and do a little bit of a horizontal adjustment this way and the photo looks a bit more natural. 
The important thing to remember with cropping in the Photos App, or in any editing you do, is the changes aren't permanent. When you're done this is what the photo will look like in your library and it will stay like that. When you use it somewhere else this is what you'll get. But you always have the ability to use this Revert to Original button or even when you're just looking at the photo you can go to Image and Revert to Original. The original is always saved along with what edits you've made. So when you crop something you're never destroying the original image. You're replacing it with a cropped image. You can always get back to the original image. So say if you wanted to crop this photo here, just down to the swans like that, and use it for something. You can and then you can always go back and Revert to Original to get back the entire photo. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Cropping Photos on Your Mac in the Photos App”

Todd

8 months ago

Great tutorial, Gary, as always!

Question: The crops in Photos always seem to be only some form of square or rectangle, but no circle. Is it possible to make a circular crop in Photos? I know Preview can do it, but I have not found how to do it in Photos.

Gary Rosenzweig

Todd: No, you can't have an image file that is not rectangular. Circular images and the like would be rectangular images with the area outside of the shape simply transparent. You can do that with most image editing apps. It is always a rectangle, but with some transparent pixels.

Frank Scully

Can you explain what the difference is between 4 X 3 and 16 X 9. Both seem to me to be the same mathematical proportion

Frank: 4x3 ad 16x9 are not the same. 4x3 would be the same as 12x9, not 16x9.

Graham Hoare

Gary having owned Apple devices for 18 years I have learnt a lot from this video- Thank you

Cropping Photos on Your Mac in the Photos App

Comments: 5 Responses to “Cropping Photos on Your Mac in the Photos App”

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