How to Crop a PDF and Remove White Margins

Learning how to crop a PDF takes a minute: you draw a box around the part of each page you want to keep, and everything outside it is hidden. It is the fastest way to remove white margins, scanner borders and crop marks. Mac and iPhone can do it in Preview, and a browser tool covers Windows, Android and pages of mixed sizes.

Crop, resize or delete: which one do you need?

These three jobs sound alike but change a PDF in different ways.

For changing paper sizes, see Resize PDF. To remove whole pages, read how to delete a page from a PDF.

How to crop a PDF online with FileKiwi

This works in any modern browser on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android.

1. Open Crop PDF and add one PDF, up to 50 MB.
2. The first page appears with a crop box on top. Drag the box and its 8 handles around the content you want to keep. The margins in millimeters update while you drag.
3. Under Apply to, choose All pages or This page only.
4. Use Previous and Next to check other pages, then download the cropped PDF.

With All pages, FileKiwi cuts the same share of each edge on every page. A document that mixes large and small pages is therefore cropped in proportion, instead of the box cutting into the smaller pages.

Example: a receipt scanned on a full page

Say you scanned a small receipt on an A4 flatbed. The receipt sits in a narrow strip and the rest of the page is white or gray. Drag the box tightly around the receipt, leave a few millimeters of white, and choose This page only if the other pages are normal documents.

The result is a page the size of the receipt. It fills the screen on a phone, and when printed with fit to page it comes out large and readable.

Text and images are not converted or compressed, so quality does not change. Cropping runs in your browser; a copy of the PDF you add is also kept in a private folder on our server for 30 days, then deleted, and the result is not stored.

How to crop a PDF on Mac with Preview

These steps follow Apple's guide for Preview on macOS Tahoe 26.

1. Open the PDF in Preview.
2. If the Markup toolbar is hidden, click the Show Markup Toolbar button, then click Rectangular Selection.
3. Drag over the part of the page you want to keep.
4. Click the Crop button in the Markup toolbar.

Take a moment to line up the selection before you click Crop. You can undo, but a careful box saves a second try.

For exact numbers, choose Tools > Show Inspector, click the Crop Inspector button and pick a unit, such as millimeters. To undo, choose Edit > Undo Crop, or later File > Revert To > Browse All Versions.

Apple's guide describes cropping one page. In practice, selecting several page thumbnails in the sidebar before you click Crop usually applies the same box to all of them, but check every page afterward, because a box that fits page 1 may cut into a page with a different layout.

How to crop a PDF on iPhone

Since iOS 26 the iPhone has its own Preview app, which can crop PDF pages, as described in Apple's iPhone guide.

1. Open the PDF in the Preview app.
2. Scroll to the page you want to crop and tap the Crop button.
3. Drag the blue handles to select an area, tap inside it, then tap Crop.

You can also tap the page count to show thumbnails, touch and hold a page and choose Crop Page. To undo, tap the More button, then Undo. Preview crops page by page, so for a long document with the same margins everywhere, the browser tool with All pages is faster.

How to crop a PDF on Windows 11 and Android

Windows 11

Windows 11 has no built in way to crop a PDF, and the PDF reader in Microsoft Edge cannot do it either. Open FileKiwi in Edge or Chrome and use the steps above; nothing has to be installed.

If you only need one chart or signature as a picture, not a PDF, the Snipping Tool (Windows logo key, Shift and S) can capture that part of the screen. A cleaner option is to crop the page and convert it with PDF to JPG at 300 DPI.

Android

Android has no standard tool for cropping an existing PDF. Use FileKiwi in Chrome and pick the file from Downloads or Google Drive. For new scans, the Google Drive scanner has a Crop & Rotate button, so you can trim the page before the PDF is created.

Cropping hides content, it does not erase it

A PDF page has a crop box that tells viewers which part of the page to show. Cropping tools change that box. FileKiwi sets both the crop box and the media box, so the area outside is hidden in every viewer and is not printed.

The hidden part is still inside the file, though. Someone with a PDF editor can enlarge the box again and see everything. Apple does not say whether Preview erases the cut area, so treat a Preview crop the same way.

That matters when you crop to hide an account number, an address or a signature near the edge. To remove it for good, crop first, then run Flatten PDF in Whole pages mode. Every page becomes an image of what is visible, so the hidden area is gone; the text is no longer selectable and the file can get bigger.

For the same reason, cropping does not make a PDF smaller in MB. If the file is too big to send, compress it separately.

Tips for a clean crop

• Leave a little white space. Pages cropped right up to the letters look cramped, and many printers cannot print to the edge. A few millimeters on each side is enough.
• Check odd and even pages. Scanned books often have the text block shifted left on one page and right on the next. Crop a little wider, or crop those pages one by one.
• Crop before you convert. If you need a page as an image for a slide, crop first, then convert, so the picture has no empty borders.
• Remove dark scanner edges. Flatbed scans often show a gray frame or the shadow of the lid. Crop a millimeter or two inside the paper edge so no dark line is left.
• Treat landscape pages separately. A wide table or chart in a portrait document needs its own box. Crop it with This page only.
• Think about the reader. Lecture notes and research papers with wide margins read much better on a phone or an ebook reader after cropping, because the text grows when the page fits the screen.
• Keep the original. All the methods above save a new copy or can be undone, but a separate original is the safest backup.

Which method to pick

• One page on a Mac or iPhone: Preview, built in and offline.
• Every page with the same margins, or mixed page sizes: FileKiwi with All pages.
• Windows or Android: FileKiwi in the browser.
• Private details near the edge: crop, then flatten in Whole pages mode.

Whichever you choose, page through the cropped file once before you send or print it, and keep the original until you are happy with the result.

FAQ