How to Crop a Video on Mac
The fastest way to crop a video on Mac is to open the clip in Photos, click Edit, press C for the Crop tool, and drag the selection rectangle around what you want to keep. Here's the full sequence, the aspect presets that are actually there, and how to walk it all back.
Crop a video on Mac with the Photos app
Double-click the clip in Photos, click Edit in the toolbar, then click Crop, or just press C, which is quicker once you've done it twice. Apple's crop and straighten tools apply to videos as well as photos, which is the part most people don't expect and the reason you rarely need to open a video editor for this.
An adjustable rectangle appears over the frame. Drag its edges to enclose what stays. Along the top you'll find aspect presets including Square, 4:5 and 16:9, plus Custom when none of them is the shape you're after. Auto takes a first pass at both cropping and straightening, which is worth one click before you start doing it by hand.
When the shot is tilted, not badly framed
Half the clips that feel wrongly cropped aren't cropped wrongly at all, they're leaning. Photos gives you three separate controls for that: the Straighten, Vertical and Horizontal sliders, which correct a tilt, a converging vertical and a skewed horizontal respectively. Straightening always eats a little of the frame, because rotating a rectangle inside a rectangle has to, so it's worth doing before you commit to the crop rather than after.
If it goes wrong, Reset clears the current cropping and straightening while you're still in the editor, and Revert to Original removes every adjustment from the video afterwards. Nothing you do here is a one-way door.
Framing is a judgement you make three times
Cropping is rarely settled on the first attempt. You crop, you watch it, the subject sits slightly too low, you crop again. Montaj keeps 100 steps of undo and redo behind every edit, so re-deciding costs nothing and you're never quietly choosing between "leave it wrong" and "start over".
It all runs on your device. The footage never leaves it to get reframed. If you only needed to crop a video on Mac once, Photos closes the job; this is for the clip you keep re-framing until it looks right.
How to crop a video on Mac in 4 steps
- 1
Open the video in Photos and click Edit
The crop and straighten tools in Photos apply to videos as well as photos, so you don't need a video editor for this.
- 2
Click Crop, or just press C
An adjustable selection rectangle appears over the frame. Drag it to enclose the part of the image you want to keep.
- 3
Pick an aspect preset or go Custom
Photos offers preset ratios including Square, 4:5 and 16:9, plus a Custom option when the frame you need isn't in the list.
- 4
Straighten if the shot is tilted, then judge it
The Straighten, Vertical and Horizontal sliders fix a leaning horizon. Auto makes a first attempt, and Reset removes the crop and straightening if it made things worse.
The verdict
— Chloé, Senior Video Editor