A square from something that is not square
1080 × 1080 is the one target on this site where the default settings are almost certainly not what you want. With the chain on, a 4:3 photograph asked for 1080 wide comes back 1080 × 810, which is not square. Squareness is not a size — it is a decision about what to throw away — and the page will not make that decision quietly on your behalf.
So: unlock the chain, pick cover, and you have a 1080 × 1080 file. The mode fills the box exactly and discards the overflow, and the overflow is real. From a 4:3 photograph you lose a quarter of the width. From a 16:9 frame you lose nearly half.
What the nine points do
The grid beside the mode buttons is where the discarded strip is chosen. It is nine positions, not a rectangle you drag, and that is deliberate: nine positions is arithmetic, and dragging a rectangle is cropping, which is a different tool with a different job.
- Centre keeps the middle. It is the default and it is right for landscapes, objects and anything shot with the subject in the middle.
- Top centre keeps the top. It is right for almost every photograph of a person, because heads are near the top of the frame and centre crops chins.
- The corners and edges exist for the cases where the subject is not in the middle and you know exactly where it is.
Whichever you pick, the divider above the controls is worth dragging before you save. The left side is your original at its own size and the right side is the square, and the strip that vanished is the difference between them.
Questions we get asked
- Can I move the crop myself instead of using the nine points?
- Not here. The moment a handle appears on the frame this stops being a resizer and starts being a cropping tool, and the two want different pages, different controls and different explanations. Nine anchors covers the cases where the answer is obvious; when the answer is not obvious, you want to choose the rectangle yourself somewhere else.
- Why not add white bars instead of cutting?
- Because padding a picture out to a square is a different operation with a different result — it adds pixels that were never photographed, and where those bars sit and what colour they are turn into their own set of decisions. This page only ever resamples what is already in the frame.
- Is 1080 × 1080 always the right square?
- It is the most-typed one. 640 × 640, 512 × 512 and 256 × 256 are in the preset row for the smaller cases, and each of them behaves identically — the anchor matters and the mode matters, and only the numbers change.