Crop PDF pages online, free, in your browser
Some PDFs carry a lot of nothing. A scanned chapter has dark shadows down each side. A research paper has margins so wide that the text is tiny on a phone. A train ticket prints as a small rectangle lost on a full sheet. Cropping fixes all three: you keep the useful part of the page and the rest goes out of view.
This free PDF cropper works online with no account, no watermark and no daily limit. You can crop PDF pages free whether the file has two pages or two hundred. It is a visual cropper: you see the real page and drag the box over it, so there are no numbers to guess. The PDF is opened by your own browser, so nothing is uploaded, and a slow connection makes no difference once the page has loaded.
What does crop pages mean in a PDF?
Every PDF page has a visible area, a rectangle that tells the reader how much of the page to show and print. When you crop pages in a PDF, you make that rectangle smaller. It is like sliding a smaller window frame over the page: you see less, but the paper behind it has not been cut. Nothing on the page is redrawn or resized.
When cropping is worth doing
- Scans and phone photos that show the desk, fingers or black edges around the paper
- E-books and papers with wide margins that are hard to read on a small screen
- Repeating headers, footers or page numbers that you want out of sight
- A single chart, table or figure you want to lift out for a slide or an assignment
- Tickets, labels and receipts that sit in one corner of a big blank page
Crop PDF pages individually or all at once
The tick box above the page decides how far your box reaches. It is ticked when you start.
One box for every page
With Crop every page the same way ticked, the box you draw on any page is applied to all of them. This is the quick way to trim the margins of a report or a book, where each page has the same layout. Flip through a few pages before you save. A box that fits page 1 neatly may clip a wide table on page 14.
Crop PDF pages separately, each with its own box
Untick the box when pages differ, which is normal for scans and photographed notes. Now you can crop PDF pages individually online, one by one, without opening each one in a separate program: go to a page, draw its box, move to the next. Pages where you draw nothing stay exactly as they were, so you can crop just one bad page in a long file.
Can you crop PDF pages in half?
Books are often scanned two pages to a sheet, and people want to cut each sheet down the middle. There is no automatic split-in-half button here. For a few sheets there is a workaround: crop the file once keeping the left half, then start again with the original and keep the right half. You get two files that you can join with Merge PDF and put in order with Organize PDF. For a whole book this is slow work.
Crop PDF without losing quality
Many croppers quietly turn each page into a picture, cut the picture and wrap it in a new PDF. The text goes soft and can no longer be selected. This tool does not touch the page content at all. It only rewrites the numbers that describe the visible area. That is why you can crop a PDF page without losing quality, for free, every time:
- Text stays as real text. You can still select, copy and search it.
- Vector drawings and fonts stay razor sharp at any zoom level.
- Photos and scans inside the page are not re-compressed. A PDF you crop with good quality scans inside it comes out with the same high quality scans after the crop.
What happens to the file size
A smaller page does not mean a smaller file. When you crop a PDF, the size in KB or MB stays almost the same, because the hidden parts are still stored inside. If you searched for an online PDF resizer because a form wants a file under 200 KB or 500 KB, crop first if you like, then use Compress PDF to a target size.
How do I permanently crop a PDF?
The crop is saved inside the file. Every reader, browser and printer will show the smaller page. But the trimmed content is hidden, not deleted. Someone with the right software could widen the visible area again. So never crop to hide an account number or a name. Use Redact PDF to black out private details, which removes them for good.
How to trim PDF margins and white space
Margins are the most common reason to crop. To crop PDF margins, keep the tick box on and drag from just above the top-left of the text to just below the bottom-right. Leave a thin border of white, around the width of a pencil, so the text does not look cramped and a printer does not clip it.
How to adjust margins on a PDF file
A PDF has no margin setting like a word processor. Cropping can only make margins narrower. It cannot add space or move the text. If the margins on a PDF file are too small for binding or hole punching, go back to the source document, adjust them there and export again, for example with Word to PDF.
Can I crop a PDF to A4 size?
Not to exact measurements. The cropped page becomes the size of the box you draw, and there is no field to type 210 x 297 mm. If you need to crop PDF pages to A4 size for printing, draw a box with A4 proportions, a little under one and a half times as tall as it is wide. Then pick Fit to page in the print dialog. The printer will scale it onto the A4 sheet cleanly.
Crop a shipping label PDF from Flipkart, Meesho or Amazon
Sellers download hundreds of labels a week, and every marketplace prints them differently. A Flipkart or Meesho label PDF usually puts the label in the top half of an A4 page with the invoice or the tax details below, and a thermal printer loaded with 4 x 6 inch stickers cannot use that. If you print the full page, the label comes out tiny in one corner. Cropping the PDF down to the label is the fix, and this page does it without a paid label tool.
Crop Flipkart and Meesho labels to 4 x 6
Open the label PDF here, keep Crop every page the same way ticked, and drag a box around one label, from just outside its top-left corner to just outside the bottom-right. Because a marketplace uses the same template for every order, that one box fits every page. Click Crop PDF, then print the cropped file with the paper size set to 4 x 6 (or 100 x 150 mm) and Fit to page. Keep a hair of white around the barcode; a scanner needs that quiet zone to read it.
When labels sit in different places
Amazon and some courier labels shift position, or a page carries two labels stacked together. Untick the box and crop those pages one by one. If a sheet holds two labels, the fastest route is to crop the top half as one file and the bottom half as a second file, then join them with Merge PDF. Cropping does not touch the barcode itself, so it stays sharp and scannable.
Crop PDF to JPG, crop an image, or remove pages
Cropping is often one half of a bigger job.
Crop a PDF file to JPG online
This tool saves a PDF, not a picture. To get a cropped JPG, crop here first, then open the result in our PDF to JPG converter. It draws only the visible area, so the image comes out already cropped, at up to 300 dpi. Both steps run in your browser.
Crop an image or figure inside a PDF
You cannot reshape a single picture while leaving the rest of the page alone. What you can do is crop the PDF page down to the image, chart or diagram you want, so the page holds that and nothing else. Untick the box, draw tightly around the figure and save. If you need only that page, pull it out afterwards with Split PDF.
Remove whole pages instead
Cropping trims the edges of pages. It does not remove pages from the file. To delete blank or unwanted pages, open the PDF in Organize PDF, delete the pages you do not need and save.
Crop a PDF on Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone or in Edge
To crop a PDF there is no app to install and no free download to look for. If you searched for a PDF crop app for PC, a crop PDF editor, or something that works offline, the answer is the same: the tool is a web page, so it runs wherever a modern browser does. Once the page has loaded, the cropping itself runs on your device, so it keeps working if the connection drops.
On Windows, the PDF viewer that comes with Edge can draw and highlight but has no crop command. You can still crop a PDF with Edge: open this page in a tab and drop the file in. Chrome and Firefox work the same way, on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebooks.
On an Android phone or an iPhone, drag the box with your finger. If you made the PDF from camera photos with Scan to PDF, cropping is the natural next step to cut away the table around each sheet.
Crop PDF not working? Check these first
Cropping is simple, so when it fails the cause is usually the file, the printer or the viewer, not the box you drew.
- The file will not open. It is password-protected. Unlock the PDF with the password you know, then crop the copy.
- The crop looks right here but the old margins are back in another app. A few older viewers ignore the crop box. Open the file in Chrome, Edge or a current PDF reader and it will show the trimmed page.
- The box sits on the wrong part of a rotated scan. Rotate the pages first with Rotate PDF, then crop.
- The browser freezes on a very long scanned book. Every page is drawn on screen so you can see it. Split the file into parts of 50 to 100 pages and crop each part.
- You need a value, not a box. The tool has no fields for millimetres or inches; draw the box by eye and check the result page by page.
PDF margins cut off when printing
If the edges of your PDF are cut off on paper, cropping will not help, and it may make it worse. Almost every printer has an unprintable strip a few millimetres wide around the sheet. A page with text right at the edge, including a page you cropped tightly, loses that strip. In the print dialog choose Fit to page or Shrink to printable area instead of Actual size. If you are going to crop a PDF that will be printed, leave a little white around the content on purpose.