Hopefully you already know how great Preview is. It comes built in with every Mac, it handles PDFs and images with ease, and does a great deal of basic image editing just fine, saving you the bother of opening more substantial, more expensive image editors. Here’s a tip for getting perfect square crops inside Preview.
To crop an image in Preview, make sure you’re in Select mode and just start dragging on it. A selection box will appear, which you can resize and move around until it’s just right.
If you want to crop to a perfect square, you could do it manually, relying on the pixel measurements that appear at the bottom-right corner of your selection to tell you when the selection is square.
Or you could do it the easy way: hold down Option and Shift while dragging. Now, your selection will be constrained to a square.
(You’re reading the 54th post in our series, 100 Essential Mac Tips And Tricks For Windows Switchers. These posts explain to OS X beginners some of the most basic and fundamental concepts of using a Mac. Find out more, or Grab the RSS feed.)
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
21 responses to “How To Crop Any Image To A Perfect Square Using Preview [100 Tips #54]”
The number of times I have done this manually! Thank you so much for an excellent tip. tip.
Shift + drag also does a square selection, but more natural one – from the top-left corner. Shift + Option + drag is the center oriented square.
this has been a feature on computers for over 15 years.
Giles, is there a way to specify the pixel dimensions?
does not stay in a square for me??!!
not that i’m aware of
How do I get to Tip #1?
Ok, I think I have a hang of this now.
Next tip?
Would be great if it worked, but it doesn’t on my machine. Nor are there even any pixel measurements. (Yes, I hit “select all” first. And tried other variations.) Typical Mac uselessness.
It looks like the 100 tips have stopped half-way.
Is Gilles fired ?