Where a photo gets cropped, and who decides
Every template crops. The only question is whether it crops at the centre of the picture or at the centre of the subject.
Why the centre is usually wrong
Photographs are not composed for circles. A portrait taken at arm’s length puts the face in the upper third; a landscape photo of a shop puts the sign to one side. Crop either at the centre and you get a chest, or a doorway, or a very good picture of a wall.
Under every uploaded image in the editor there is now the whole picture with a single dot on it, and beside it a frame showing the crop the template will actually make. Drag the dot to the part that must stay in view — a face, a dish, a logo — and the frame updates as you drag. Arrow keys nudge it; one button puts it back in the centre.
- The profile photo is cropped to a circle, so the anchor decides which part of a wide photo survives.
- A background covers the whole screen and is cropped hardest on a phone held upright; anchor it on the part that is not sky.
- A card image on a link is a strip; anchor it on the product, not on the table it stands on.
- A new upload starts at the centre again, because the new picture is not framed like the old one.
Habits that make the anchor unnecessary
- Crop before uploading when the subject is tiny in the frame. An anchor moves a window; it does not zoom.
- For a profile photo, prefer a picture where the face already fills a good part of the frame.
- For a background, prefer something with an empty area: text sits on top of it, and no anchor rescues a busy photo.
- Check the phone preview beside the editor. It is the real template, not a drawing of one.
What happens to the file
The anchor is stored as two percentages next to the image, and nothing is cut from the file itself. Change a template and the same photo is re-cropped from the same original with the same anchor, so switching designs never destroys a framing you liked.
The picture itself is re-encoded on upload, stripped of EXIF — phone photos carry GPS coordinates — and capped in size so that a page with six images still opens on mobile data. What you upload is never what we serve.