Crop Pictures to Fill Wide Screens

It took me a while to notice that my new, wonderful, iPhone 7+ camera was not taking pictures that filled the screen. The iPhone’s screen’s width and height is known by it’s aspect ratio of 16:9. That’s nearly twice as wide as it is high. My computer screen is also 16:9, as is the most common display on YouTube, and newer TVs. So why does the iPhone camera only take pictures that are 4:3 – just a little bit wider than it is high?

This is a 4:3 ratio photo displaying on a wide screen – 16:9. Notice the  black bars on either side?	This photo is  widescreen format (16:9) so the picture gets the benefit of the whole screen.

My Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S5) has a camera setting for this. You can choose for the camera to shoot in wide-screen resolution or not.
There may be plenty of reasons for this of which I am unaware. All I know is that I want my pictures to fill the screen. If I can’t take them that way, I can crop them after the fact.

Using Google Photos

You can easily use Google Photos editing tools to crop to the 16:9 ratio. That’s what I did in the photo example above. The one on the left was how the iPhone took the photo, on the right is my cropped version.

• Open the photo with Google Photos and click the pencil icon to edit
• Click the Crop/rotate icon
• Click the button to see the constraints for cropping
• Choose 16:9

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