How to Crop a PDF Online Free — Trim Margins, No Upload
You scanned an ID card, a fee receipt or a cheque, and it came out as a full A4 page with the useful part sitting in one corner. Or a report has so much white margin that the text looks tiny on a phone. Cropping fixes both: you keep the part of the page you want and cut the rest. Here's how to crop a PDF for free in your browser, without installing anything and without uploading the file.
When cropping a PDF helps
- Cut an ID, receipt or cheque out of a full-page scan before attaching it to a form or email
- Trim wide white margins so the content fills the screen on a phone
- Remove a header, footer or stamp you don't want to share
- Keep one chart or table from a report to drop into a presentation
Cropping changes what's visible on a page. If you want to remove whole pages instead, see how to delete pages from a PDF; to pull some pages into a new file, see how to extract pages from a PDF.
How to crop a PDF in 5 steps
- Open Split & Merge PDF and add your PDF. Its pages appear as thumbnails.
- Open the page menu. Right-click the page you want to crop. On a phone, tap the page's menu button.
- Choose Crop page… The page opens full size.
- Drag a box around the part you want to keep, then click Save crop. Very small boxes are refused, because they wouldn't make a usable page.
- Download. Choose Download from the same page menu to save that document, or Download All (ZIP) if you're working with several files.
Need to crop more than one page? Repeat steps 2–4 for each one. Every page is cropped separately, so each can have a different box.
Got a page with too much around it? Crop it in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Crop a PDF — FreeWhat happens to a cropped page
| If you need… | Do this |
|---|---|
| A clean image of an ID, receipt or chart to share or upload | Crop — ideal |
| To copy text from the cropped part later | Copy it before cropping, or read it back with OCR PDF |
| A sharp print of the cropped area | Crop from the best-quality scan you have |
| A smaller file for an upload limit | Crop first, then compress to the size you need |
Tips for a clean crop
- Straighten the page first. If the scan is sideways, use Rotate right page from the same menu before cropping.
- Leave a little breathing room around an ID card or receipt — cutting right on the edge can clip a corner or a number.
- Check the result by opening the downloaded PDF before you submit it anywhere.
Private by design
Split & Merge runs entirely in your browser. The PDF you crop — often an ID, a cheque or a bill — is never uploaded to a server, which is exactly how it should be for documents like these.
Common questions
Can I crop all pages at once?
Not in one step — each page is cropped on its own, which also means pages can be cropped differently.
Does cropping reduce the file size?
Not reliably. A cropped page becomes an image, which can be bigger or smaller than the original page. If you have a size limit, compress the PDF afterwards.
Can I undo a crop?
Before you download, yes — crop the page again or start over with Reset. The original file on your device is never changed.
Related guides
Keep the part that matters. Crop PDF pages free, in your browser.
Open the Crop Tool