How to. . . crop digital photos for free

You've taken an almost-great photo. If only you could eliminate one small part of it. If you don't have photo-editing software or don't think you can figure out the best crop yourself, there's a website that will do it for you. And it's free.

1. Go to croppola.com. The site uses algorithms that find the best composition from your pictures and crop them for you. To begin, upload one or more pictures by clicking Select Files to Upload. We tried BMP, JPG, PNG, GIF and TIF files formats, but the site only uploaded the JPG and PNG files.

2. The site's default upload is the same ratio as your original file. If you prefer a different ratio, click its radio button and then click Recompute Crops. To adjust the crop itself, click, hold and drag the illuminated area of the photo to the crop you prefer. Release when you are done.

3. Click Download Cropped Images to save your file. The download is in a ZIP file. If you don't have software to extract the image, you can download a 40-day free trial of WinRAR at cnet.com. The site does not retain images. Both original uploads and cropped downloads are purged every half-hour.