How to Crop a PDF on iPhone

You have a PDF with three centimetres of white margin around every page, or a scan that caught the edge of your desk, or a document where you only want the table in the middle of page four. So you open it on your iPhone, look for a crop tool, and there is not one.

That is not you missing a setting. iOS genuinely has no crop-the-page command for PDFs, and iOS 26 did not add one even though it added a whole new app for handling documents.

I build Grabio, a free Shortcut for exactly this class of iPhone gap, and cropping PDFs is one of the requests I get most and can least fix with a single tap. So here is the honest map: three routes that work, what each one costs, and which to pick.

Why there is no crop button, and what Markup does instead

The confusion comes from Markup. Open a PDF in Files, tap the pen icon, and you get pens, highlighters, shapes, text boxes and a signature tool. It looks like an editor, so people reasonably assume cropping is in there somewhere.

Markup draws on top of a page. It does not change the page. You can put a white rectangle over a header to hide it, and if you flatten the file that rectangle stays visually, but the page is still the same size and the text underneath may still be selectable and searchable depending on how the file is saved.

That is a cover-up rather than a crop, and it is a bad idea for anything sensitive.

What iOS 26’s Preview app does and does not do

iOS 26 added Preview, a new system app on the Home Screen, and it is a real improvement for document work. It is a dedicated home for PDFs and images with a proper toolset: view and mark up, add and remove pages, split and merge files, sign with Markup, and AutoFill to fill out PDF forms.

Merging is the headline. That used to have no first-party path on iPhone at all, which is why my guide to merging PDF files on iPhone sends you to an outside tool. On iOS 26, try Preview first.

Cropping is the gap. As of iOS 26.6.1, going through Preview’s toolbars, I cannot find a control that trims a page’s dimensions. Everything on offer operates at the page level, adding pages, removing pages, reordering pages, or on top of a page with Markup.

Nothing resizes the page itself. If Apple adds one in a future release I will update this post, because it would make the rest of it unnecessary.

Route one: rescan it, which is the best answer for scans

If your PDF came from a scan, and most cropping problems do, the cleanest fix is to scan it again properly rather than to repair the bad scan.

The iPhone’s built-in scanner has a real crop tool, which is the thing nobody realises. Open Notes, tap the camera icon, choose Scan Documents. Hold the phone over the page and it detects the edges automatically.

After it captures, you get an editing screen with a crop control where you can drag each corner exactly where you want it. The Files app has the same scanner behind its three dots menu.

This gives you a genuinely cropped, deskewed, contrast-corrected page, which is better than anything you can salvage from an already-flattened PDF. Full walkthrough in scanning a document or receipt to PDF.

Obvious limitation: this only works if you still have the physical page or can display the document on another screen to photograph.

Route two: PDF to images, crop, back to PDF

This is the general-purpose answer and it works on any PDF regardless of where it came from. It is more steps than it should be, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

1. Turn the PDF into images. Each page becomes a separate picture in your Photos library. That process is covered in converting a PDF to images on iPhone, and it runs on your phone using Apple’s own Shortcuts actions with nothing uploaded.
2. Crop each image in Photos. Open the image, tap Edit, tap the crop icon, drag the handles. This is where the actual cropping happens, using Apple’s own editor, which is genuinely good at it.
3. Rebuild the PDF. Select the cropped images and combine them back into a single document. That is turning multiple photos into one PDF, also on-device.

For a two-page document this takes about a minute. For a forty-page report it is miserable, and I would look hard at whether you actually need every page cropped or just the three you are sending.

Route three: when you only need one region of one page

Often “crop this PDF” really means “send them just this table”. In that case, skip the whole document.

Open the PDF, pinch to zoom until the region you want fills the screen, take a screenshot, then crop the screenshot in Photos and turn it into a one-page PDF. The screenshot-to-document path is covered in converting a screenshot to PDF.

Ten seconds, no tools, and for the common case of “here is the relevant bit” it is the right answer. It falls apart if the recipient needs the whole document or needs the text to be selectable, which brings us to the thing nobody mentions.

What cropping a PDF this way actually costs you

Every route above except rescanning turns your pages into pictures, and that has consequences worth understanding before you send the result to someone who matters.

The text stops being text. It cannot be selected, copied, searched with Command-F, or read by a screen reader. If you are cropping a contract, a form someone has to fill in, or anything going to a person who uses assistive technology, an image-only PDF is a genuinely worse document.

File size usually goes up, sometimes a lot. A text PDF stores letters. An image PDF stores pixels for every page, and a cropped page of pixels is often several times larger than the text page it replaced.

If you are cropping in order to email something, you may end up further from the limit than when you started. Compressing a PDF afterwards is usually necessary, and reducing a PDF for email covers the specific attachment caps.

Quality is fixed at whatever resolution the conversion produced. Zooming in on the result will show you the limit.

Given all that, my actual advice: crop the smallest number of pages you can get away with, and if the document has to stay text, ask whether a highlight or a page-range extract would do the job instead of a crop.

Where Grabio fits

Grabio is a free Apple Shortcut. Not an App Store app, no account, no cost. It lives in your share sheet and drives Apple’s own Shortcuts actions, which means the PDF-to-images step and the images-to-PDF step both happen on your iPhone. The file does not go to a server, and those tools work in airplane mode.

What Grabio does not have is a one-tap crop for PDFs, because iOS gives it nothing to build one on. Anyone telling you they have solved that on-device is either uploading your file somewhere or doing the images round trip and not telling you.

If the multi-step version is what you need, Get the Shortcut and it will at least be four taps instead of four apps. It is free and it installs from Safari in one tap.

Cropping a PDF on iPhone: FAQ

Can I crop a PDF on iPhone without an app?

Not directly, because iOS has no crop-the-page tool for PDFs. You can do it without installing anything from the App Store by converting the pages to images, cropping them in Photos, and rebuilding the PDF, which uses only Apple’s own features.

Does the new Preview app in iOS 26 crop PDFs?

As of iOS 26.6.1, no. Preview adds and removes pages, splits and merges documents, marks up, signs and fills forms. Nothing in its toolbars changes the dimensions of a page.

Why does my cropped PDF end up bigger than the original?

Because the crop turned text pages into images. Text is stored as characters and takes almost no space. A page of pixels takes a great deal more, so an image-based PDF is often several times the size of the text version it replaced.

Can I just cover the part I want to remove with Markup?

Visually yes, safely no. Markup draws on top of the page rather than removing anything, and the content underneath can survive in the file. Never use a white box to hide sensitive information in a document you are sending to someone else.

Is there a way to crop every page in a long PDF at once?

Not on iPhone with Apple’s own tools. Every route is page by page, which is why a forty-page document is a bad candidate for this. A desktop PDF editor handles bulk cropping properly, and for a long document that is the honest recommendation.

What is the best route if the PDF came from a scan?

Rescan it with the built-in scanner in Notes or Files. Its editing screen has a real crop control with draggable corners, and it also straightens and cleans up the page, which gives you a better result than anything you can recover from the finished PDF.