Crop a Video to 9:16

October 2, 2026

A phone held upright has no use for a wide picture. Post one to Reels, Shorts or TikTok and the app does the only thing it can: it shrinks the whole frame until it fits across the middle of the screen, leaving black above and below and a picture the size of a postcard. Everybody scrolls past it.

Crop the video to 9:16 and you pick which strip of the frame survives, instead of letting the app shrink all of it.

What a vertical feed does to a wide clip

The feed is a tall rectangle, nine units across and sixteen down. Your clip is the opposite shape. Something has to give, and the app will not cut your picture without being told to, so it keeps everything and scales it down.

The result is familiar. Two black bars, a strip of video between them, faces too small to read on a phone held at arm’s length. Text burned into the clip becomes unreadable. On a feed where people decide in half a second whether to keep watching, a postcard in the middle of a black screen loses.

Cropping trades differently. The picture fills the screen, the subject is life-size, and the price is paid at the sides, where the picture is cut away.

Doing it

Open the crop page and drop your video in. It takes the file itself, not a link from somewhere — the clip has to be on your phone or computer already. Up to a gigabyte.

The clip appears with a bright frame over it in 9:16, which is what the page starts on. The frame sits in the middle at first, and it does not have to stay there: drag it across the picture, or use the Position slider underneath, which runs from one edge to the other. Everything outside the frame is what you are throwing away, and you can see it while you decide.

Press the button, wait a moment, download the MP4. The file is encoded fresh, so it plays anywhere and uploads to any of the three apps without further argument.

Two other shapes live on the same page. 1:1, the square, for a feed post that should not be tall. 16:9, the wide one, for a clip shot vertically that has to go on a television or a desktop player. Same frame, same dragging, same button.

What you lose at the sides

Take a normal 1920 by 1080 clip and crop it to 9:16. The height is kept whole, and the width that survives is 608 pixels. That is about a third of the original width. Two thirds of the picture are gone.

Most of the time that is fine, because most of the time the interesting thing sits near the middle. But look at the frame before you press anything, because two cases bite.

A face near the edge. An interview framed to the left, a person standing at one side of the shot — the centre crop will slice them in half or lose them completely. That is what dragging the frame is for: move it until the face is inside, and the rest goes instead.

Two people, or anything spread across the width. A conversation with one person on each side does not survive a vertical crop at all. No position of the frame holds both. For that clip the honest answer is to leave it wide, or to film it again.

Cut first, crop second

If the clip has dead time at the beginning or the end, take it off before cropping rather than after. Cropping re-encodes every frame it is given, including the seven seconds of you reaching for the phone, and that is time and file size spent on something you are about to delete anyway. Cut the ends off first, then crop what remains.

The other way round, afterwards, is compression. A cropped clip is already smaller than it was, because there are fewer pixels in every frame, but if it still has to travel through a messenger the compressor will take it the rest of the way. Trim, crop, compress — in that order, each step working on less than the one before. The rest of what the site does is written up in the blog.

FAQ

Open the crop tool, drop the file, move the frame until the right part of the picture is inside it, press the button. The clip stops being a postcard and starts filling the screen.

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