Introduction

Learn how to crop a picture for an effect or for printing purposes in Windows Photo Gallery.

Before You Start Editing

Before you start editing digital photos there are a few things you need to know.

• Most digital cameras save pictures in JPEG format which uses lossy compression. Every time you save a picture with lossy compression you lose some of the detail. This is the nature of lossy formats.
• To prevent losing too much data make all your edits before saving the picture.
• When you edit a picture in Windows Photo Gallery the original version of the picture is saved in %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images and is kept there forever. If you ever need to revert back to the original version of the picture it’s there. You might want to periodically browse to that folder and delete pictures you have backed up if you edit a large number of pictures to save disk space.

  Hint: You can easily navigate to the Original Images folder by right-clicking the start button, click Explore, then paste %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images in the address bar, and then press Enter on your keyboard to go directly to that folder.

• Always use the highest resolution possible when taking digital pictures. This enables you to resize and crop pictures without losing detail.

Crop a Picture

1. Open Windows Photo Gallery and open the Picture you want to edit.
2. Once the picture you want to crop is open using Windows Photo Gallery click Fix at the top of Windows Photo Gallery.
3. Click Crop Picture on the right.
4. Notice the box that appears on the picture. Anything outside of the box will be cut away leaving only what’s inside the box.

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5. You can adjust the size of the box by pointing to any of the dots located on each corner of the box and while holding down the left mouse button move your mouse left, right, up, or down to resize it.
6. If you are cropping a picture for printing you can set the proportions of the box to 8×10, 5×7, and many other popular proportions by clicking the drop down box under Proportion and select the desired proportions.

   Hint: You can change the size of a box with specific proportions while keeping the same proportions by dragging the corners of the proportioned box in or out with your mouse with a proportion selected under Proportions. Whew, that was a lot of proportions!

7. Once you’ve selected what you want to crop from the picture click Apply under Proportions.

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8. Save the picture by clicking the Next (Right Arrow) button at the bottom center of Windows Photo Gallery.