Editing a photo

The editor is for the photo that only needs straightening before it goes out — a crop, a quarter turn, a level horizon. Your retouching stays in your usual editing app; this is the quick fix in the browser.

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Opening the editor

In the viewer, click Edit — the brush on the bar above the photo (on a phone it is under ⋯). From the grid, choose Edit from a photo's ⋯ menu, or right-click the photo. It edits one photo at a time, so with several photos selected it is greyed out in that menu.

The editor is the viewer's editing mode. It fills the screen on the same background you picked in the viewer — press L, or click one of the four swatches at the right of the bottom line, to change it here too. Edit photo and the photo's name are at the top, the photo with its crop box in the middle, the straighten scale under the photo, and the tools down the right side (under the photo on a phone).

What you see is a preview, so a RAW or HEIC photo opens quickly; the copy you save is made from the original. A photo can be edited once it has finished processing after upload.

Crop

Drag the corners — marked like the frame lines in a viewfinder — or the bars on the edges to choose the area, or drag inside the box to move it. Thirds lines help with the composition, what falls outside the box is dimmed into the background, and the box never goes past the edge of the photo.

Under Aspect ratio, each ratio is drawn as the shape it makes: Free, Original (the photo's own), 1:1, 4:5, 3:2 and 16:9. Picking one fits the largest box of that shape around the middle of your crop and holds the box to it as you drag; Landscape and Portrait under them turn it the other way. Free lets each side move on its own.

Click the crop box, or tab to it, and the arrow keys move it; hold Shift to move it further.

Rotate, flip and straighten

Under Rotate and flip, Rotate left turns the photo a quarter turn counter-clockwise; click it again to keep turning. Flip horizontal mirrors it left to right. The crop box turns and flips with the photo.

Straighten is the scale under the photo, from −45° to 45° like the scale on a lens barrel, with the angle at its right end. Drag the needle to level a horizon or square up a scan; while you do, the thirds become a finer grid to line it up against. With the needle selected, the arrow keys turn the photo a tenth of a degree at a time, or a whole degree with Shift. The crop box shrinks as you turn, so its corners stay inside the picture and the copy never has blank corners. Double-click the scale, or click the reset button beside the angle, to go back to 0°.

Undo and Redo at the top step through your changes (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z, or ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z on a Mac). Reset takes the photo back to how it opened.

The line along the bottom says what Save copy will make: its size in pixels and megapixels, worked out from the original, then the ratio, the turn, the straightening angle and the flip — or Unedited until you change something.

Saving

Save copy, at the top right, lights up once you have changed something. Click it and Media Moana makes the edited copy from the full-size original — not from the preview you were looking at — and puts it next to the original, in the same folder, with "(Edited)" after its name. The copy is a JPEG, or a PNG when the original is a format that can hold transparency, such as PNG or WebP. It keeps the original's camera details: when it was taken, the camera and lens, and where. The original stays exactly as it was.

The editor closes and the copy takes a moment to make. It appears in your library when it is ready — its details say it was edited and which photo it was made from — and you can follow it under Jobs, as Photo editor. Like any photo, it counts toward your storage, so Edit is unavailable while your storage is full; it uses none of your AI actions.

Leaving without saving

Click the arrow at the top left (Close), or press Esc, to go back to where you were. If you have changes you haven't saved, the editor asks first — Discard your changes? — so a crop is not lost by accident: Keep editing takes you back to the photo, Discard closes the editor without making a copy.

For the same change on many photos at once — a share size, a print crop, a JPEG from a RAW — use a preset instead.