How to cut or resize an image

Cutting or resizing photos takes a lot less time and effort than you think. Here are some programs to cut images or resize them

Are you making a Powerpoint presentation or an online photo album but have images that are too large to upload/post? Just cut or resize them and you're done. Don't know how to do it? No problem: in the following paragraphs we'll explain how to cut or resize photos, so you'll have files suitable for your purposes.

As you can imagine, cutting photos is a simple task, but you'll have to know which are the best tools to succeed. Specifically, you'll be able to use either programs to cut and resize images or you can cut photos online: it's up to you to choose the option that best suits your needs, both in terms of image quality and in terms of time required to edit the photo. Ready? Let's see how to do it.

Program to cut photos

There are plenty of programs to edit photos, but Photoshop and GIMP are the ones that best suit your needs. Both of them, in fact, allow you to cut a photo in a precise way and with high quality: ideal, in short, if you want to print the photo or you have to insert it in an official document (such as a business presentation).

To cut photos with Photoshop you'll first have to open the image within the software, select the Rectangular Selection tool (or press "m" on the keyboard) and, in the upper bar, click on the drop-down menu under Style: here you will be able to choose the type of cropping between Normal (i.e. freehand), Fixed Proportion (16:9 or 18:9 for smartphones, for example; or 4:3 for printing photos; or 1:1 if you want to upload photos to Instagram from PC), Fixed Size (you will indicate the size of the cropping area). Click on the Image menu at the top and choose Crop.

To resize the image without cropping it, instead, press the state sequence "alt "+"ctrl "+"i" and wait for a small window to appear in the middle of the screen. Here you just have to enter the height and width values and click OK.

To crop photos with GIMP just click on the Tools menu and then Transform > Crop and draw the crop area on the photo with the mouse pointer. As soon as you have created the crop area, an area will appear in the side bars with some options for the tool: change them as you like and double-click inside the crop area to complete the operation.

To resize an image in GIMP, click on Image > Scale Image and, in the window that appears, enter the desired values for length and width and click OK.

Cut Photos Online

If you need something faster and more immediate, you can decide to cut photos online with one of the many web applications. Croppola, probably, is the most suitable for this purpose: just upload the image and, in the right column, choose one of the available options. You'll be able to choose the proportion of the cropping area, choose whether to cut the photo with ad hoc dimensions for the various social platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) or, more simply, do everything by hand by choosing the cropping area with the mouse.