How to Crop and Resize Photos using Your home PC or Mac

Sometimes, you just need to tweak. You’ve had a great photo session and received your photos and are excited to use them everywhere. Hopefully, your photographer has given you different sizes and crops and walked you through which size is best for different platforms. But then, you run into a situation where the specs are different, or the file is too big. You could reach out to your photographer, and they would be happy to send you different sizes, but you can easily do it yourself on your computer.

There are several easy ways to crop and resize pictures to the correct aspect ratios on both PC and Mac:

On Windows:

Cropping

• Photos App: Open your image in the Photos app, click on the Edit icon, then the Crop tab. You can choose from preset aspect ratios or use the Free option to manually adjust.

• Paint: Open your image in Paint, select the Crop tool, and manually adjust the crop area.

• Snipping Tool: Open the Snipping Tool, load your image, and use the crop tool to adjust the size.

• BatchPhoto: This software allows batch cropping, making it easy to process multiple images at once.

Resizing

• Photos App: Open your image in the Photos app, click on the Edit icon, select the Resize option, and choose the desired dimensions or percentage.

  • If there is a 2Mb (megabyte) requirement, you would choose 2000Kb or 2Mb.

• Paint: Open your image in Paint, click on the Resize button, and choose to resize by percentage or pixels. Enter your desired dimensions and click OK.

• Snipping Tool: Unfortunately, Snipping Tool does not offer resizing capabilities.

• BatchPhoto: Use the resizing feature to set the desired dimensions for multiple images at once.

On Mac:

Cropping

• Photos App: Open your image in the Photos app, click on the Edit button, then the Crop tool. You can choose from preset aspect ratios or manually adjust the crop area.

• Preview: Open your image in Preview, select the Crop tool, and adjust the crop area.

• Photoshop: Open your image in Photoshop, select the Crop tool, and adjust the crop area.

Resizing

• Photos App: Open your image in the Photos app, click on the Edit button, then select the Resize option and enter the desired dimensions.

  • If there is a 2Mb (megabyte) requirement, you would choose 2000Kb or 2Mb.

• Preview: Open your image in Preview, go to the Tools menu, select Adjust Size, and enter your desired dimensions.

• Photoshop: Open your image in Photoshop, go to Image > Image Size, and enter the desired dimensions.

These tools should help you easily crop and resize your pictures to the desired aspect ratios and dimensions. For a specific aspect ratio, here’s some general guidance:

Let's use the 5:7 aspect ratio as an example:

On Windows:

Photos App:

1. Open your image in the Photos app.

2. Click the Edit icon (pencil) in the top-right corner.

3. Select the Crop tab (scissors icon).

4. Click the Aspect Ratio button, and choose 5:7 from the list.

5. Adjust the crop area as needed and click Save a copy.

Paint:

1. Open your image in Paint.

2. Click the Select tool, and choose Rectangular selection.

3. Manually adjust the selection to the 5:7 aspect ratio.

4. Click the Crop button to apply.

On Mac:

Photos App:

1. Open your image in the Photos app.

2. Click the Edit button in the top-right corner.

3. Select the Crop tool (scissors icon).

4. Click Aspect and choose 5:7 from the list.

5. Adjust the crop area and click Done.

Preview:

1. Open your image in Preview.

2. Click the Markup Toolbar button (pen icon) to show editing tools.

3. Select the Rectangular Selection tool.

4. Manually adjust the selection to the 5:7 aspect ratio.

5. Go to the Tools menu and select Crop.

I hope this helps you with your image editing tasks!