PDF Crop

Crop PDF on iPhone

Trim the margins, headers, footers, or whitespace off PDF pages on iPhone. Draw a rectangle on the page, apply it to the current page or to every page in one sweep, and export. The exported PDF has the new, smaller dimensions — not a visual mask over the original.

Per-page crop Apply to all pages New file dimensions On-device

Best for: scanned book pages with thick margins, screenshots converted to PDF with a status bar visible, slide-deck PDFs with footers or page numbers to remove, receipts with mostly blank trailing space. For irregular shapes or covering up text without resizing the page, use the redaction flow in edit-pdf-iphone.

How do you crop a PDF on iPhone and keep the new dimensions when you share it?

Cropping a PDF on iPhone is three motions: open the PDF, drag a rectangle over the area you want to keep, then choose whether the crop applies only to that page or to every page in the file. The key thing that distinguishes a real crop from a visual trick is what happens at export — a real crop changes the page dimensions in the file itself, so the recipient sees the smaller page. A visual mask only hides content in the viewer; reopen the same PDF in a different app and the margins come right back.

ScanLens crops at the file level. When you export, the new PDF has the cropped dimensions baked in. The cropped-out content is gone from that exported file — it is not hidden in invisible margins. Cropping is rectangular only, so for irregular shapes (covering a logo, blacking out a paragraph) you use the redaction tools in the editor flow. The original PDF stays in your library untouched until you choose to delete it, which means you can always recrop from a fresh source if the first crop was too aggressive.

Visual-only mask vs file-level crop — why the difference matters

Several iPhone PDF apps offer a "crop" feature that is really a visual mask. The viewer renders the page with the masked area hidden, but the underlying PDF still has the original dimensions and the original content. The moment you share that PDF and the recipient opens it in Mail, Acrobat, or a browser preview, the margins are right back where they started. Users get caught by this every week: "I cropped the screenshot, but the recipient still sees the status bar at the top."

ScanLens does a file-level crop. The exported PDF actually has the new, smaller page boundary. Whoever opens it — a different app on a different device, a printer, an e-signature service — sees the cropped area only. The status bar, the page footer, the wide gutter, whatever you trimmed, is gone from the file. This matters most for screenshots-as-PDFs (chrome bars you do not want a client to see), scanned book pages (gutter and margin distract from the content), and presentation handouts where you want to remove a thick footer band before printing.

If you just want a cleaner reading view for yourself and do not care about the exported file, a visual mask is fine. If you need the recipient to see the cropped version, the crop must happen at the file level — that is what ScanLens does and what the rest of this page describes.

Four ways to crop a PDF in ScanLens

Per-page crop

Each page gets its own crop rectangle. Useful when one PDF has mixed content — a title page with a header band, body pages with even margins, an appendix with a different layout. Tap into a page, drag the crop handles to where you want the new boundary, and move on. Other pages stay at their original dimensions until you crop them too.

Apply to all pages

One crop rectangle applied to every page in the PDF. Useful for consistent scans where every page has the same margin to trim — a scanned book chapter, a long contract with the same footer on every page, a slide deck where every slide has the same wide white border. Set the rectangle once, tap "apply to all," and the crop propagates through the file.

Snap-to-content

Where the page content has clear edges against whitespace, ScanLens can auto-suggest a crop rectangle that hugs the content. You still confirm or nudge the boundary before applying — auto-detection is a starting point, not a final decision, especially on scanned pages where shadow or paper texture can fool the edge detector. Saves a lot of dragging on bulky multi-page jobs.

Batch crop

Crop every page in one sweep using either the apply-to-all rectangle or snap-to-content on each page. For a fifty-page scanned book, this is the difference between an evening's work and forty seconds. Combine with the rotate and delete-pages tools to clean up the entire file in one session.

Crop Flow

How to crop a PDF in ScanLens, step by step

From opening the PDF to sharing the cropped copy takes about a minute for a single-page job and a few minutes for a long document with apply-to-all. Six steps, no app switching.

Step	Action	Tips
1	Open the PDF in ScanLens	From the Files app, Mail share sheet, iCloud Drive, or AirDrop
2	Tap the crop tool	Page tools menu — between rotate and delete-pages on the toolbar
3	Drag the crop rectangle	Corner handles resize, edge handles slide one side; snap-to-content gives a starting box
4	Apply to current page or all pages	Choose per-page if pages differ, apply-to-all if every page has the same margin
5	Preview the result	Swipe through pages to confirm nothing important got trimmed; recrop if needed
6	Export and share	Share sheet → Mail, Messages, Files, AirDrop; exported PDF has the new dimensions

PDFs worth cropping on iPhone

Scanned book pages with thick margins

Phone-scanned book pages often have a wide gutter, a thick top margin, and uneven side borders from where the page curves into the spine. Apply-to-all with snap-to-content trims the lot in one pass. The cropped PDF reads cleanly on a small screen and prints with much less wasted paper.

Screenshots converted to PDF with the status bar visible

iOS Files turns a long screenshot into a PDF, but the status bar (time, battery, signal) ends up at the top of every page. For a client send-off or a clean reading copy, crop the status bar away before sharing. Per-page crop if only the first page has a bar, apply-to-all if every page does.

Slide deck PDFs with footers and page numbers

Presentation exports to PDF often carry a footer band — corporate logo, slide number, footer template — that adds nothing for the reader. Crop the band away and the slides look much more like the on-screen presentation. Apply-to-all is the right call here since the footer position is identical on every slide.

Receipts and invoices with empty trailing space

Receipts printed from a web checkout often run on a tall, mostly blank page — the actual receipt occupies the top half. Crop the empty bottom away so the file is just the receipt. Useful for expense reports where reviewers want compact pages rather than scrolling past whitespace.

Presentation handouts with empty bottom regions

Handouts exported with three or six slides per page often leave an empty band for notes. If you do not need the notes space — final distribution, not in-meeting use — crop the empty band so the pages print at a tighter size. Combine with compress to drop the file size further before emailing the deck around.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the recipient see the cropped version of the PDF?

Yes. ScanLens applies the crop at the file level, so the exported PDF has the new, smaller page dimensions. Whoever opens it — Mail recipient, e-signature service, the printer down the street — sees only the cropped area. There are no hidden margins in the exported file.

Can I undo the crop after I export the PDF?

The exported file is final — the cropped-out content is genuinely gone from that new PDF. But the original PDF stays untouched in your ScanLens library until you delete it, so you can always recrop from the source. Treat export as a one-way operation and keep the source if you might need to recrop with different margins later.

Does crop work on text-based PDFs and scanned PDFs?

Both. ScanLens crops the page boundary regardless of whether the content is rasterized scanner output or text-based PDF from a word processor. Important caveat: cropping does not reflow text. If your crop slices through a paragraph, the cropped text is just cut — the page does not re-paginate to keep the words intact. Set the crop rectangle so it sits in the margin or whitespace.

Can I crop only one page in a multi-page PDF?

Yes — that is what per-page mode is for. Use per-page crop when one page in the PDF needs a different rectangle than the others (a title page with a header band, a body page with even margins). Use apply-to-all when every page has the same margin you want to trim — for example, a scanned book where each spread has the same gutter.

Does ScanLens upload my PDF to crop it?

No. Cropping happens on the device. The PDF is read, re-rendered with the new page boundaries, and written back to your ScanLens library or shared out through the iOS share sheet. There is no upload, no account, no server pass. If you keep the file in an iCloud Drive folder, Apple's standard sync applies — your iCloud, not a ScanLens server.

What about cropping to a non-rectangular shape?

ScanLens crops to rectangles only. For irregular shapes — covering a logo, hiding a paragraph, redacting a signature area — use the markup or redaction flow in the PDF editor at /edit-pdf-iphone. There you draw opaque rectangles over the content you want hidden. The page dimensions stay the same; the content is covered rather than trimmed off.