EasyCropper – Simple Online Image Cropping

Lately, I have been finding myself cropping images and screenshots very often, which has become more of a time-wasting chore. I am constantly loading up Photoshop or Illustrator which takes longer to boot up than it takes for me to do the actual cropping and editing.

That is when my search for a better solution took me online, where I discovered EasyCropper, which promises to provide “a simple way for you to crop any image for use on the web.”

The process is very simple, but does EasyCropper provide the easiest online image cropping solution?

Upon my first look, EasyCropper seems to provide a very simple interface with no frills or extra features. It is what they claim to be… a way to crop photos, and that is it. Killer Startups believes that “it is easy enough for anyone to use, even if you have never before edited photos online.” I started noticing its first flaws very early on, however.

The screenshot above is the first screen that you arrive at when starting the cropping process. It is simple, but not descriptive enough about what the “width” and “height” fields should include. Should you provide the original resolution of the selected image, or are they wanting the desired proportions?

After completing this step incorrectly the first time around, I discovered that users are expected to enter their desired image resolution. This in turn, led me to the next screen, which got even simpler. There was a highlighted box on the screen (matching the size of my given dimensions) with the photograph behind it. The portion that is within the box is what will be included after cropping, while the grayed-out portions of the photo will be the portions to be removed.

The photograph is draggable, allowing you to choose a specific area to include. Also, there is a slide bar located at the bottom of the screen, which allows you to scale the photograph in size. I did notice, however, that this does reduce the quality of the image, as I expected. I was hoping for a way to edit the size of the “bounding box” but in order to do this, you must go back to the first screen and enter in new dimensions, which I found time-consuming and disappointing.

Once you have your final selection, you continue by simply clicking the “Crop It!” button, which will lead you to the following screen to download the image by clicking on the arrow.

Overall, to answer my question of whether EasyCropper is the easiest cropping tool, the answer is yes, but at the expense of more features… At least for now. I found EasyCropper to provide a great service that may work well for some, but it is lacking in some areas for those of us who need more. For example, it could be useful to anyone who needs to develop an avatar for a profile and is given specific maximum dimensions. You could just use this service to load up the image, enter your maximum resolution, make a few final changes, and there you have it.

If you need more capabilities and a more detailed interface, I recommend SnipShot. It provides a similar crop function, but allows for more advanced editing. Missing from EasyCropper, but included in SnipShot, is the ability to resize the bounding box while determining what you want to crop out.

Also, SnipShot can handle larger files, which posed a problem to EasyCropper. An attempt to load an enormous 9 MB TIFF image file with EasyCropper failed to load, while SnipShot was able to load it right up (although slowly).

Whichever option you choose, it is sure to make the process of cropping photos a little easier. If you don't have any software to crop images at all, then you should give both of these services a try to see which one better suits you.