What is 9:16 used for?

Stories, reels, shorts and vertical video generally, plus phone wallpapers and lock screens. It is the shape of a phone screen held normally, which is why platforms built for phones adopted it — content in this ratio fills the display with nothing else visible around it.

Why does a 9:16 crop remove so much?

Because it is the most extreme of the common ratios relative to what cameras produce. A 4:3 phone photo keeps only about 56 per cent of its width; a 3:2 landscape photo keeps roughly half. There is no way around the arithmetic — the only choice is which slice to keep, or whether to pad instead of cropping.

Should I crop or add bars?

Crop when there is a single subject a vertical frame can contain — one person, one object, one building. Pad when the composition needs its width, which is most landscapes and most group photographs. Padding puts the whole picture in the middle of the frame with a colour above and below, which is what most well-made stories from ordinary photos actually do.

Where should the subject go in the frame?

In the middle two thirds. Story interfaces overlay a profile name and progress bars at the top and a reply box and buttons at the bottom, together covering roughly 250 pixels at each end of a 1920-pixel-tall frame. Anything placed there will be hidden behind the app’s own controls.

Crop an image to 9:16

The vertical ratio is already selected. This is a hard crop — drag the frame onto what matters.

Choose an imageor drag it here, or paste it

JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF and BMP. Your file is processed on your device.

How do I crop an image to 9:16?

Add your photo below — the 9:16 ratio is already applied — drag the frame onto the part you want to keep, and download. 9:16 is far taller relative to its width than anything a camera produces, so a landscape photograph keeps only a narrow vertical strip and choosing which strip is the whole job.

The most aggressive crop there is

Nine by sixteen is a phone screen stood upright, and nothing a camera produces is anywhere near that tall. A standard phone photograph is 4:3; cropping it to 9:16 keeps a little over half its width. A landscape shot from a camera loses even more.

This is worth knowing before you start rather than after, because it changes the question. You are not adjusting the framing of a photograph — you are choosing which vertical slice of it becomes a new photograph.

Drag the frame; do not accept the centre

The crop frame starts in the middle because it has to start somewhere, and the middle of a wide photograph is very often not where the subject is. A person standing to one side, a building at the edge of a landscape, a product that is not dead centre — all of them end up cut in half if the default is left alone.

The frame is draggable by pointer and drivable from the keyboard: arrow keys move it, shift and the arrows resize it, and escape resets. On a phone the handles are large enough to catch with a thumb.

Or do not crop at all

When the width of the picture is the picture — a landscape, a group, a wide product shot — a 9:16 crop destroys it and there is a better answer. Put the whole image on a 9:16 canvas with a colour above and below it, using the border tool’s exact-canvas mode.

The photograph then sits at full width in the middle of a filled frame, nothing is removed, and the space above and below becomes somewhere to put text. This is a common enough style that it reads as a decision rather than as a failure to crop properly.

Leave room for the interface

Whatever ends up in a 9:16 frame, the app displaying it will put its own controls on top: account name and progress bars along the top, a reply field and action buttons along the bottom. Between them they cover roughly the top and bottom eighth of the screen.

So the usable area is the middle. Faces, text and anything that has to be read belong there, and the ends carry sky, background or nothing. Placing a caption carefully at the bottom of the frame and then finding it behind a reply box is the most common mistake at this ratio.

Then set the exact size

Cropping fixes the shape; it does not fix the pixel count. If a platform wants a specific resolution as well, resize to 1080 × 1920 — the standard size for this ratio — or open Advanced options here and set a file size limit if that is the binding constraint.

Common questions

What is 9:16 used for?: Stories, reels, shorts and vertical video generally, plus phone wallpapers and lock screens. It is the shape of a phone screen held normally, which is why platforms built for phones adopted it — content in this ratio fills the display with nothing else visible around it.
Why does a 9:16 crop remove so much?: Because it is the most extreme of the common ratios relative to what cameras produce. A 4:3 phone photo keeps only about 56 per cent of its width; a 3:2 landscape photo keeps roughly half. There is no way around the arithmetic — the only choice is which slice to keep, or whether to pad instead of cropping.
Should I crop or add bars?: Crop when there is a single subject a vertical frame can contain — one person, one object, one building. Pad when the composition needs its width, which is most landscapes and most group photographs. Padding puts the whole picture in the middle of the frame with a colour above and below, which is what most well-made stories from ordinary photos actually do.
Where should the subject go in the frame?: In the middle two thirds. Story interfaces overlay a profile name and progress bars at the top and a reply box and buttons at the bottom, together covering roughly 250 pixels at each end of a 1920-pixel-tall frame. Anything placed there will be hidden behind the app’s own controls.