How to crop a screen recording on a Mac, and how to avoid needing to.

The recording workflow

1. Import the recording into Photos

   Add “Screen Recording [date] at [time].mov” to your Photos library. Photos edits are reversible: Apple’s guide says adjustments to a video do not change your original footage.

2. Open the video in Edit

   Double-click the video, then click Edit in the toolbar.

3. Crop

   Click Crop in the toolbar and drag the selection rectangle to enclose the area you want to keep. To cancel the crop, click Reset.

4. Save the change

   Click Done. The crop applies to the entire video; Photos cannot crop only one part of it.

5. Export the cropped video

   Select the video and choose File > Export > Export 1 Video. Pick a Movie Quality: 480p, 720p, 1080p or 4K. Do not use Export Unmodified Original, which exports the file as it was imported.

6. Check the edges

   Play the exported file and look at all four edges through the whole video. A window that moved mid-recording will drift out of a crop that looked right on the first frame.

Can QuickTime Player crop a screen recording?

No. Apple’s QuickTime Player User Guide lists the edits the app can make: trim a movie or clip, split a movie into clips, rearrange clips, add a movie or clip, rotate or flip a clip, and remove audio or video. Rotate and flip turn the whole frame; none of the six changes which part of the frame is kept.

People often mean one of two other things by “crop”. Shortening the recording is trimming: Edit > Trim in QuickTime Player. Removing a section in the middle is cutting: View > Show Clips and Edit > Split Clip. Both are covered in the guide on trimming and cutting a screen recording. This page is about the frame itself: removing the menu bar, the Dock, a sidebar, or everything outside one window.

Three free ways to crop a screen recording on a Mac

Each route has one thing it does better than the others. Photos crops to any shape with the least effort. iMovie crops as part of a larger edit. ffmpeg crops to exact pixel values and can be repeated on fifty files.

Crop a screen recording in iMovie with Crop to Fill

Use iMovie when the same recording also needs cuts, a speed change or a voiceover. Apple’s iMovie guide notes that the Crop to Fill frame is constrained to a 16:9 aspect ratio. That suits a recording of a 16:9 window and is wrong for a tall phone-shaped area.

A crop in iMovie applies to the selected clip. If you split the recording, select every piece and repeat the crop, or crop before you split.

1. Import the recording and add it to a movie’s timeline.
2. Select the clip in the timeline.
3. Click the Cropping button to show the cropping controls.
4. Click Crop to Fill. An adjustable 16:9 frame appears over the picture.
5. Move and resize the frame until it holds the area you want.
6. Click the Apply button in the cropping controls. The area inside the frame fills the viewer.
7. Export with File > Share > File. To undo the crop later, select the clip and click Reset in the cropping controls.

Crop with ffmpeg when you need exact pixels

ffmpeg is a free command-line tool that you install separately. Its crop filter takes four values in this order: output width, output height, and the x and y position of the top-left corner of the area to keep. The form is crop=w:h:x:y, and the constants in_w and in_h stand for the input width and height.

To remove a 50-pixel strip from the top of a recording, keep the full width, reduce the height by 50, and start 50 pixels down: ffmpeg -i input.mov -vf "crop=in_w:in_h-50:0:50" output.mp4

Leave x and y out and the crop is centered. Measure the strip you want to remove on a still frame first, because the height of the menu bar in pixels depends on your display and its scaling.

• Keep a 1280×720 area whose top-left corner sits at 100, 80: crop=1280:720:100:80
• Remove 10 pixels from the left and right and 20 from the top and bottom: crop=in_w-2*10:in_h-2*20
• Keep the centered two thirds of the picture: crop=2/3*in_w:2/3*in_h
• Keep only the right half: crop=in_w/2:in_h:in_w/2:0

Avoid the crop: record a window or a portion from the start

A crop throws pixels away after the fact, and it only works if the thing you want stayed in the same place for the whole recording. Recording the right area in the first place is sharper and takes no editing.

The built-in recorder does this well. If your goal is a clean frame around one app, this is the free answer.

1. Press Shift-Command-5.
2. Choose Record Selected Portion and drag the borders of the selection until it frames what you want. On macOS 26 Tahoe or later you can choose Record Selected Window and click the window.
3. Open Options to pick a microphone and, if clicks matter, Show Mouse Clicks.
4. Click Record. Stop with the Stop button in the menu bar or Command-Control-Esc.
5. Keep the window still. If you move or resize it during a portion recording, it leaves the frame.

Qreata cannot crop: what it does instead

Qreata has no crop tool. You cannot cut the frame of a finished recording down to a smaller rectangle in its editor, and you cannot change a recording’s aspect ratio. It also does not import video files, so it cannot crop a recording made with QuickTime Player or any other app. If you came here to crop a file you already have, use Photos, iMovie or ffmpeg above.

What Qreata offers is on the recording side. You pick a source before you start: Display, Window, Application or Area. Window captures only that window, even when another window covers it. Application records one app’s windows on one display, including its dialogs. Area is a choice of five presets: Center · 80%, Left half, Right half, Top half and Bottom half. There is no free-drag selection, so for an arbitrary rectangle the built-in Record Selected Portion is the better tool.

Two editor features get confused with a crop. A zoom (1.2–4.0×) enlarges part of the frame for 0.5 to 10 seconds and then returns to the full view; it does not remove the menu bar for the whole video. Padding shrinks the recording inside the frame and shows a background around it; it adds space and removes nothing.

If you record in Qreata and still need a smaller frame, export the MP4 and crop that file with ffmpeg or one of the other free routes. For the rest of the edit, Qreata is $49 once for 3 Macs with future updates and no subscription, with a 7-day full trial. It is in beta and runs on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later.

What a crop does to sharpness and shape

Cropping keeps fewer pixels. Take a 1920×1080 recording and crop to a 1280×720 area: you keep 921,600 of 2,073,600 pixels, about 44%. Shown at the same size as before, the picture is enlarged 1.5 times and looks softer.

Shape matters as much as size. Players and video hosts expect 16:9. A crop to an arbitrary rectangle plays with bars on the sides or the top unless you choose a 16:9 area, which Photos offers as a preset aspect ratio and iMovie enforces.

If the window you care about is small on a large display, record it at a larger size. A crop cannot recover detail that was never captured.

Questions about this workflow