photo crop how to turn off aspect ratio lock?

That was so helpful!! My nephew had changed my settings to 16:9, and having shot pans my whole professional life, I kinda liked it. But the auto cropping was making me crazy. Inspired by your post, I Googled how to change aspect ratio back (I hadn’t watched him) & returned camera to 4:3. I can again live my life! THANK YOU!! 😁

Hi zeffiretto,

Thank you for participating in the Apple Support Communities. We understand you'd like to crop photos manually in freeform mode. When you first tap the crop button in Photos you should be able to drag any corner to manually adjust in any shape you want or just make sure you're in Freeform mode. This article explains more about this: Edit photos and videos on iPhone - Apple Support.

"Crop, rotate, or flip a photo or video

1. In Photos, tap a photo or video thumbnail to view it in full screen.
2. Tap Edit, tap , then do any of the following :

• Crop manually: Drag the rectangle corners to enclose the area you want to keep in the photo, or you can pinch the photo open or closed.
• Crop to a standard preset ratio: Tap , then choose an option such as square, 16:9, or 5:4.
• Rotate: Tap  to rotate the photo 90 degrees.
• Flip: Tap  to flip the image horizontally.

3. Tap Done to save your edits, or if you don’t like your changes, tap Cancel, then tap Discard Changes."

We hope this helps.

Take care.

i found a workaround. You have to click the preset ratio button & select freeform. EVERY time you edit. The new default is aspect constrained cropping. Im unable to find a way to specify the default and change it. Very frustrating as i use crop all the time, and now requires 2 extra clicks!

I was wondering why mine started requiring me to manually change crop to freeform every time, when it had defaulted to freeform until recently. After searching and reading from a few sites, I realize it changed when I recently set my default aspect ratio to 16:9 in camera settings. This post from a couple years ago gave me the "aha" moment: How can I make "freeform" the default cro… - Apple Community

Apparently, freeform can be (or maybe always is?) the default crop setting only for the default 4:3 aspect photos. For any cropped photo, it is no longer the default. As indicated in the post above, when we set to 16:9 (or other aspect ratio) it is not actually taking a 16:9 photo, but is taking a 4:3 photo cropped to 16:9. Since it is already a "cropped" photo, when we go into crop it, it defaults to the current 16:9 crop option, and we need to manually change to freeform. If we instead choose Original on the left in the crop aspect setting, it reverts to the 4:3 photo we actually took, adding more above and below the 16:9 photo we might have thought we were taking.

I had changed my camera default to 16:9 recently since I most frequently take landscapes and wanted the wider shot. Since it is actually taking a 4:3 photo anyway, I think I will change it back to 4:3 to get the default freeform crop back and just crop each when desired to get what looks best to me.

I was going to edit my post above a bit to make it clearer but waited to long and could not edit it anymore, so this is a somewhat reworded version:

I was wondering why mine started requiring me to manually change crop to freeform every time, when it had defaulted to freeform until recently. After searching and reading from a few sites, I realize it changed when I recently set my "creative controls" to on (under phone settings, camera, preserve settings) so it would remember the 16:9 aspect ratio that I usually use (creative controls will remember aspect and some other settings most recently used, rather than always resetting to 4:3). It had annoyed me that I always had to change it to 16:9 when taking a photo. This post from a couple years ago gave me the "aha" moment: How can I make "freeform" the default cro… - Apple Community

Apparently, freeform can be the default crop setting only for the default 4:3 aspect ratio photos. For photos using one of the built-in crop aspect ratios, the crop setting also locks to that aspect ratio until you change it (if you change to freeform and edit and save, it will still be set to freeform if you go in to edit that photo again). As indicated in the post above, when we take a 16:9 or square aspect ratio photo, it is actually taking a 4:3 photo cropped to that chosen aspect ratio. And, since it is already "cropped" to an aspect ratio, by default the crop setting is locked to the same aspect ratio, and we need to manually change to freeform. Note that if we choose Original on the left in the crop aspect setting, it reverts to the 4:3 photo we actually took, adding more around the 16:9 or square photo we might have thought we were taking.

I had changed my creative control setting to keep my 16:9 aspect as my default since I most frequently take landscapes and wanted the wider shot. But, since I am actually taking a 4:3 photo anyway, I have now turned off the creative control option and will just let it always revert to the default 4:3 with freeform crop as the default. I will just take photos in 4:3 and crop each as desired to get what looks best to me.

Nice! This solved it for me. Once I disabled the “creative controls” setting inside “preserve settings”, then edited a photo and changed cropping to “Freeform”, it stayed with that crop default next time I edited a photo. Many clicks saved, thanks!

Thank you gevvt; that is the solution. I also found the crop function to be locked in as the default rather than on Freeform. I went into “settings-camera-preserve settings” and toggled off all of the preserved settings. Now the crop defaults to Freeform again! I may check after to see if there was one preserved setting in particular causing the crop to set in that locked ratio, but for now I just wanted to see if the fix worked.

This answer is not helpful because it is just stating how it works right now, which is literally what we want to change…. We specifically do not want to have to tap the ratio selections every single time we edit a photo and we didn’t have to do so in the past. Fortunately, user “gevvt” found out what the problem was and shared the solution with us.

Worst design decision EVER. Sr technical product manager Starbucks

Agreed - The worst decision EVER!!. Who thought this was a great idea??? (Technical Consultant - Mobility). If its not broken don't fix it.

Just turn off “live” option

it still doesn't work. I would like to crop the bottom of my photo without the left and right side getting cropped as well.

Jeff, your solution doesn't work. I have a iPhone 11, could this be a reason?