How to Batch Crop Photos to Square on Windows, Mac, iPhone and the Command Line

Why "batch crop" usually means one rectangle for everything

Almost every batch cropping tool asks you to define a crop area once and then applies those same coordinates to every image in the set. The tools are generally honest about it if you read closely: the well-known browser-based bulk croppers describe setting "the same crop dimensions, aspect ratio, or shape for all your images," and one of the most popular labels its crop area as being "based on first image."

That design is not laziness. Deciding where to cut a photo is the hard part, and a fixed rectangle is the only thing a simple tool can offer without making a judgment about content. If you shot 200 products on a tripod against the same backdrop, a fixed rectangle is exactly right and anything cleverer is wasted effort.

The trouble starts with mixed batches. A catalog assembled over six months, a client shoot with portrait and landscape frames mixed together, a phone camera roll of inventory shot at arm's length: these have the subject in a different place in every file. Crop them all to the same 1:1 box and you are not cropping, you are rolling dice 200 times.

There are only three honest answers to that. Shoot to a template so the fixed rectangle works. Crop them one at a time. Or use something that decides per image where the subject is. This guide covers all three, and the platform sections below tell you which category each tool falls into.

Batch cropping on Windows

Windows has no built-in multi-image cropper, but it does have a built-in multi-image aspect-fill tool, which is the part most articles get wrong. The Photos app crops one image at a time; PowerToys crops a whole folder in Fill mode; IrfanView crops a folder to fixed pixel coordinates.

The Photos app: one at a time

Microsoft documents the Windows Photos editor as a single-image tool, offering to "crop, flip, or rotate photos to trim out the unwanted parts manually or use preset aspect ratios." There is no multi-select crop. Select twenty photos and you still get twenty editing sessions.

PowerToys Image Resizer: yes, it crops

This is the correction worth carrying away from this section. PowerToys Image Resizer is widely described as resize-only, and Microsoft's own documentation says otherwise. It has three fit modes, and one of them crops:

• Fill "fills the entire specified size with the image," scales proportionally, and "crops the image as needed."
• Fit fits the whole image inside the target size and "doesn't crop the image," which leaves you with a non-square result or letterboxing.
• Stretch fills the target size and "stretches the image disproportionally as needed," which distorts your product.

So the Windows answer to "crop multiple images at once" is: install PowerToys, add a custom size of 1000 x 1000 (or whatever square you need), set the mode to Fill, then right-click your selection in File Explorer and choose Resize with Image Resizer. Every file comes back a true square.

The catch is the one this guide keeps returning to. Fill performs a centered aspect-fill: it scales until the short edge matches, then trims the overflow from both ends of the long edge. Your subject had better be near the middle.

IrfanView: fixed coordinates, applied to all

IrfanView's batch conversion can crop, and the setting is buried. You open a representative image, drag a selection box over the area you want, then go to File > Batch Conversion/Rename, enable Use advanced options, open Advanced, and click Get current sel. to capture that selection's pixel coordinates into the crop fields.

That last step is the tell: IrfanView captures literal pixel coordinates from one reference image and applies those same coordinates to every file in the batch. If your images are not all the same dimensions, the crop lands somewhere different on each one. (IrfanView's own documentation does not cover this path; the workflow above is the one the IrfanView community has documented, and it matches how the batch dialog behaves.)

Batch cropping on a Mac

macOS will batch resize out of the box and will not batch crop out of the box, which is a distinction Apple's own documentation makes clearly if you look for it. Automator will crop a batch, with one uniform rectangle.

Preview: batch resize yes, batch crop no

Apple's Preview guide carries an explicit multi-image tip for resizing: display the images in the same window, select them in that window's sidebar, then choose Tools > Adjust Size. Every image is resized at once.

The crop instructions on the same page are written for a single image, and there is no equivalent multi-select note. Preview crops one photo at a time. If you have been selecting a folder in Preview and hunting for a crop equivalent of Adjust Size, it is not hidden, it is absent.

Automator: a real batch crop, one rectangle

Automator ships with a Crop Images action that works on a selection of files and can be saved as a Quick Action so it appears in Finder's right-click menu. Build a workflow with "Get Selected Finder Items" followed by "Crop Images," set your dimensions, and you have a folder-level square crop.

It applies one crop specification to every file. Mac users who have gone looking for a way to make that action choose a different region per image have consistently been told there is no automation for it, and we found no documented way either. Treat Automator as the Mac equivalent of PowerToys Fill: fast, free, built in, and blind to what is in the picture.

A word on the Crop Images action's exact fields: Apple does not publish a reference page for it, so check what your version exposes rather than trusting a walkthrough written against an older macOS.

Shortcuts

The Shortcuts app has a Crop Image action, and Apple documents only its category, describing transform actions as ones that "edit content (such as cropping an image)." The specific parameters are not documented publicly, and at least one developer report describes a crop-to-square shortcut stretching screenshots rather than cropping them. If you build a Shortcuts crop pipeline, test it on two or three throwaway files before pointing it at work you care about.

Batch cropping on an iPhone

Your iPhone can batch crop to square, with no app and no computer. The route is undocumented, it hangs on a menu that disappears if you tap the wrong thing first, and it center-crops every photo rather than reproducing your framing. We tested it on iOS 26.62 in September 2026 rather than repeating what gets published about it, because what gets published about it is mostly wrong.

This is the worst-served question in the whole subject. Search it and Google returns an Apple discussion thread from 2012 at the top, some YouTube tutorials, and several articles that carefully explain how to crop one photo. One of the highest-ranking results states flatly that the Photos app does not support cropping multiple photos at once. It does.

The route that works

1. Open your first photo, tap Edit, tap Crop, choose the Square aspect ratio, and position the crop.
2. Before you tap Done, open the three-dot menu at the top right and tap Copy Edits.
3. Go back to your library and select the photos you want cropped. This works on a multi-photo selection.
4. Three-dot menu, Paste Edits.

Every selected photo comes back square. We ran it across a four-photo selection and all four were cropped in one action.

Step 2 is the whole trick. Copy Edits only appears in that menu while you are still inside the editor. Tap Done and the option vanishes, which is why so many write-ups describe reopening the photo afterwards and hunting for a menu item that is not there.

What it does not do

It does not carry your framing. We positioned the first crop deliberately off-center, and every pasted photo came back cropped dead center anyway. What travels is the 1:1 ratio, not the region you chose.

So iOS does give you a real batch square crop, with precisely the limitation this guide keeps running into: one rectangle, taken from the middle, applied to everything. If your subjects are already centered, this is the fastest free option on any platform in this guide and you should stop reading here. If they are not, a center crop across a camera roll will cut the tops off items and slice people out of frame, and you are back to the same choice as everywhere else.

Two footnotes. Apple's own iPhone guide lists "copy and paste edits" among the editing tools but documents editing per-photo and does not describe the multi-select paste or state what a copied edit includes, so treat the behavior above as tested on iOS 26.62 rather than promised, and re-check it after a major iOS update. The Shortcuts app also has a Crop Image action, which is scriptable but undocumented in its parameters, with at least one developer report of it stretching screenshots instead of cropping them.

If your photos are .HEIC and you also need them converted, that is a separate job from cropping. iPhone photos are HEIC files, and the HEIC to JPG converter handles that conversion on its own. (Pro camera bodies from Canon, Sony and Fujifilm write .HIF files, which look similar and belong to a different workflow entirely.)

Batch cropping from the command line

The command line is where batch cropping stops being fiddly and starts being trivial, and it is also where the fixed-rectangle limit is clearest, because you are the one typing the coordinates. ImageMagick will crop a folder in one line. Neither ImageMagick nor any of the standard image libraries does subject detection, though two of them get closer than you might expect.

ImageMagick: use -extent, not -crop

The idiomatic way to crop to a centered square and resize in one pass is a fill-resize followed by an extent, which is ImageMagick's own documented approach:

magick mogrify -resize 1000x1000^ -gravity center -extent 1000x1000 *.jpg

The ^ makes the resize fill the 1000 x 1000 box rather than fit inside it, letting the long edge overflow; -gravity center -extent then trims that overflow equally from both ends. mogrify applies it across the whole glob, in place, so work on a copy of the folder.

If you reach for -crop instead, add +repage. ImageMagick's documentation is blunt about it: "Always use +repage after any 'crop' like operation. Unless you actually need to preserve that info." Without it, the crop leaves virtual-canvas offset metadata behind and downstream tools render your image in odd positions.

On ImageMagick 7, the porting guide is clear that the utilities are now subcommands: use magick mogrify, and do not use magick convert. Version 6 syntax (mogrify ... on its own) still works on most installs.

libvips and sharp: the closest thing to a smart crop in open source

Two widely used libraries do try to decide where to cut. libvips exposes vips_smartcrop(), documented as cropping an image "down to a specified width and height by removing boring parts," with an interesting parameter that defaults to an attention-based mode.

sharp, which is built on libvips and is what a great many Node image pipelines use, documents two strategies. Its entropy strategy focuses on the region with the highest Shannon entropy. Its attention strategy focuses on the region with the highest luminance frequency, color saturation and presence of skin tones. The mechanism is described as resizing so one dimension hits the target, then repeatedly ranking edge regions and discarding the lowest-scoring edge. Both apply only when the fit is set to cover.

That is genuinely useful and worth knowing about, and it is worth being precise about what it is not. Ranking edges by brightness variance, saturation and skin tone is a heuristic, not object recognition. It will often find a face because faces are saturated and skin-toned; it will also happily find a bright reflection on a countertop. The distinction between a heuristic that trims boring edges and a model that identifies the subject is the whole subject of the next section.

What Photoshop and Lightroom actually do

Photoshop and Lightroom both batch crop, and they do it in two meaningfully different ways: Photoshop records your crop as a repeatable step, while Lightroom syncs a crop proportionally across a selection.

Photoshop: Actions plus Batch. Record an action that crops and resizes one image, then run File > Automate > Batch over a folder with that action selected. It is the standard route and it is well worn, which is why it turns up as the accepted answer in the Adobe community threads that rank for these searches. Because the action replays recorded steps, expect it to reproduce your crop the same way on every file rather than adapt to each one.

Lightroom Classic: crop is a syncable setting, and it syncs proportionally. Crop one photo to a 1:1 aspect, select the rest, and use Sync Settings with Crop ticked. What is interesting is how Lightroom stores that crop. Lightroom community experts, including plugin developers who work with the catalog format directly, describe crop data as being held in relative coordinates on a 0 to 1 scale rather than absolute pixels, precisely so that a crop synced from a 20-megapixel file still makes sense on a 48-megapixel one. On that model, syncing a crop gives every photo the same proportional region rather than the same literal pixel box, which is a genuinely better behavior than most batch tools offer.

We should flag that this mechanism is described by Lightroom's user community rather than in Adobe's published help pages, which we could not retrieve on this point. The practical advice holds either way: sync the crop, then spot-check a handful of frames, because the same proportional region is still the same framing decision applied to photos that may not deserve it.

Which square size each marketplace wants

Pick the size from whichever platform has the strictest requirement in your set, then use that one square everywhere, because a single master square uploads cleanly to all of them. The figures below come from each platform's own documentation.

Amazon publishes the clearest numbers. Its seller guide states that "the optimal zoom experience for detail pages requires files to be 1600px or larger on the longest side," and that "the smallest your file can be for zoom is 1000px, and the smallest your file can be for the site is 500px," with a 10,000px ceiling. Amazon documents those pixel thresholds; it does not, in the materials we could reach, state that the main image must be square, so treat 1:1 there as a convention rather than a rule.

Etsy recommends listing images of at least 2000px on width and height, and sets a practical floor by warning that a first photo under 635px risks "showing up lower in searches." Etsy is also the one platform that documents its own cropping behavior: it displays your first photo in several placements with different thumbnail crops, and advises a horizontal or square first photo so that "the center focal point of the image appears in the cropped thumbnail views." If you want one citation for why pre-cropping matters, that is it.

Shopify states that "for square product images, a size of 2048 x 2048 px usually displays best," with a 5000 x 5000 or 25-megapixel ceiling, and recommends a consistent aspect ratio across your main images so collection grids display evenly.

eBay asks for a minimum of 500 x 500, recommends "images that are about 1600 x 1600," and says outright that "photos in a 1:1 or 16:9 aspect ratio look best in listings, search results, and other placements."

Instagram processes uploads "at the best quality resolution possible (up to 1080x1080 pixels)," and Meta's publishing documentation notes that carousel images are cropped to match the first image in the carousel, defaulting to 1:1.

Vinted and Depop publish no image dimensions at all. This is worth stating plainly because so much content asserts otherwise. Vinted's help documentation covers how many photos you can add and what makes a good one, with no size, no dimensions and no aspect ratio anywhere across its help center, its catalog rules or its locale sites. Depop's help documents photo counts only, and its Selling API specifies a minimum of one image and a maximum of eight without stating a single required dimension.

The one number either company publishes anywhere is buried in Vinted's Pro integrations API, which caps a photo at 5MB. That is a file-size limit, not a shape. Every specific ratio you have read for those two platforms is observed app behavior, not a published requirement, and it can change without anyone announcing it. We treat it the same way: our Vinted photo guide recommends a portrait crop of about 3:4 because that is what Vinted's image pipeline visibly rewards, and it says plainly that Vinted sets no official spec. Both platforms display portrait rather than square, so a square master is the wrong shape for them regardless; the cross-listing photo requirements guide covers running one photo set across platforms that disagree about shape.

One more caution on the received wisdom. The claim that platforms center-crop your image and therefore pre-cropping protects your subject is a reasonable inference from how web image display generally works, and only Etsy, Meta and Shopify document anything about their own cropping. For eBay, Amazon, Depop and Vinted, nobody outside those companies knows the algorithm. Pre-cropping is still the right move, because it removes the question rather than answering it.

For the per-platform detail, the marketplace image requirements guide has the full table, and our answer to whether marketplace product images need to be square covers when 1:1 is actually required versus merely how the thumbnail renders.

Mochify workflow: cropping a folder to square, subject kept

If your photos are not framed alike, the fix is a crop that is decided per image rather than once for the set. That is what Mochify's saliency crop does, and there are four ways to reach it depending on how many files you have and how much you want to type.

curl -X POST "https://api.mochify.app/v1/squish?smartCrop=true&width=1000&height=1000&type=jpg" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MOCHIFY_KEY" \
  --data-binary @product-01.heic \
  -o product-01.jpg

What the crop actually does, and what it does not. A saliency model looks at each image on its own and centers the square on the region a viewer's eye goes to first, typically a face, a product or the focal subject, rather than on the geometric center. If the subject sits near an edge, the crop window slides toward it as far as the frame allows. It is best effort, not a guarantee: on an obvious subject against a clean background it lands where you would have put it by hand, and on a busy scene with no clear focal point it returns the model's best estimate, so review those. There is no upscaling, so the output never exceeds the source's pixel dimensions; pick a square size your originals can actually support.

Allowances. Three images a month with no account at all, 25 a month with a free account, 3 files per batch, 20MB per file. Seller and Pro raise that to 25 files per batch at 75MB each. A Day Pass is $2 for 100 uploads within 24 hours with no account, which is the honest answer for a one-off catalog. Current numbers are on the pricing page.

Need a transparent cutout as well as a square? The background remover pairs with the crop, and background removal is included on every tier including Free.

Cheat sheet: which route does what

The one question that decides whether a batch crop will work for you is whether the tool applies one rectangle or decides per image. Here is every route in this guide, answered.

Rule of thumb: if every photo in the folder was shot the same way, use the free built-in tool for your platform and stop reading. If they were not, no fixed rectangle will save you, and the choice is per-image cropping by hand or per-image cropping by model.

Crop your batch to square now.

FAQ