"Show full photo" vs crop: controlling what shows

This article explains how the Cropping dropdown on a face-placement photo layer controls whether the photo bleeds past its frame or is clipped to a fixed crop rectangle or a crop shape you trace yourself — and how the crop, face-target box, and max content line work together.

Three modes: Show full photo, Crop to box, and Crop to shape

When a photo layer uses face placement, its size and position are driven entirely by the face-target box and max content line — not by the layer frame. Because the photo is scaled to align faces rather than to fill a fixed rectangle, it may be wider or taller than the layer's visible area. The Cropping dropdown lets you decide what happens at the edges:

• Show full photo — the photo is not clipped. It bleeds past all four sides of the layer frame. What's visible is determined by z-order (layers above mask whatever they cover). Use this when the design's surrounding artwork naturally crops the photo, or when you want to let the subject fill as much of the canvas as face math requires.
• Crop to box — the photo is clipped to a crop rectangle that you draw directly on the canvas. Only the portion of the photo inside that box shows. The rest is invisible regardless of what's above or below.
• Crop to shape — the same clipping, except the rectangle becomes a shape with as many corners as you need. Use this when the opening in your artwork is angled, tapered, or otherwise not a rectangle.

To change the setting, select the photo layer, then find the Cropping dropdown in the properties panel (it appears below the fit mode when Top Fill is active).

The crop box: a fixed canvas rectangle

When you choose Crop to box, Templified places a crop rectangle on the canvas. This rectangle is fixed in canvas space — it does not move or resize when a different photo lands in the layer. Think of it as a window cut into the canvas: the face-placed photo slides under that window, keeping the face pinned, while anything outside the box stays hidden.

You can drag the crop box's edges and corners directly on the canvas to set exactly which portion of the photo shows. Common uses:

• Showing only the upper body of an athlete (cutting off background below the waist).
• Framing the face tightly in a tight headshot slot while the face-target box controls alignment.
• Matching the crop to a decorative mask or frame element at a pixel-precise location.

Crop to shape: trace your own opening

Choosing Crop to shape turns the crop rectangle into a shape you can reshape corner by corner. Once it's on, you can edit the shape directly on the canvas:

• Move a corner — drag its handle.
• Add a corner — double-click anywhere inside the photo. A new corner is inserted on the nearest edge of the shape.
• Remove a corner — hold Alt and click the corner's handle. The shape never drops below three corners.

Nudging a seeded rectangle into an angled opening is slow, so there's also a way to trace a fresh shape from scratch. A Draw shape button appears under the Cropping dropdown whenever a crop shape is active:

1. Click Draw shape. The button changes to Click corners… Enter to close so you can tell you're tracing.
2. Click each corner of the opening on the canvas, in order.
3. Close the shape by clicking the first corner again, or by pressing Enter.

While you're tracing, Backspace undoes the last corner you placed and Esc cancels the trace. Cancelling leaves your existing crop shape untouched — the old shape stays in effect until a new one is closed, so the photo never flashes uncropped mid-trace.

Next to Draw shape is a Reset shape button that puts the crop back to the default rectangle. (It's hidden while you're tracing.)

A crop shape behaves exactly like the crop box in every other respect: it is fixed in the design, it does not move or resize when a different photo lands in the layer, and it renders identically to what you see in the editor.

Reframe: move the photo inside a fixed crop

Once a Top Fill photo is actually clipped — by a crop box, a crop shape, or a frame that clips strictly at the layer edge — and face placement is off, a reframe control appears in the properties panel. The keyboard shortcut is R.

With reframing on, dragging the photo moves the photo under the crop while the crop stays exactly where it is, and scrolling zooms the photo. That's the inverse of a normal drag, which moves the photo and its crop together and shifts the whole frame. Once you've reframed, a Reset button appears next to the control and returns the photo to its default position in the crop.

Which behaviour a drag gets by default depends on which editor you're in:

• In a design (Studio) — reframing is the default, because the crop comes from the template and the layout is fixed, so choosing which part of the photo shows is the common task. The button always names what a drag will do right now: Drag moves photo when reframing is on, Drag moves layer when it's off. Click it to flip.
• In the template editor — the default is unchanged: a drag moves the whole layer, because you're placing the slot. The button reads Reframe photo, and while reframing is on it reads Reframing photo….

Reframing is deliberately not offered in two cases:

• Face placement is on. Face placement already decides where the photo sits, so a reframe would fight the face alignment. Turn face placement off first if you want to position the photo by hand.
• Cropping is set to Show full photo. Nothing is hidden, so there's no window to reframe within — moving the photo would be indistinguishable from moving the layer.

How the face stays pinned while the body shifts

Face placement calculates the scale and position of each photo so the detected face lands in the face-target box. The crop box is then applied on top of that positioned photo. The result:

1. Every photo — regardless of how the athlete was framed at the event — is scaled and shifted to put the face in the same spot.
2. The crop box then reveals only the portion of each photo that falls inside it.

Because different photos have different amounts of body below the face (a waist-up crop vs. a full-body photo), the portion of each photo visible inside the crop box will differ — but every subject's face will be in the same position at the same scale. This is by design: face placement makes faces consistent; it does not make bodies consistent.

The three overlays coexisting

When both Crop to box and Face placement are active, you'll see three overlays on the canvas at once:

To edit the face-target box and max content line, click Edit face placement in the properties panel. The crop box is always visible and selectable on the canvas when Crop to box is active, even when face-placement editing mode is off.

If the overlays overlap and make it hard to see, zoom in. The face-target box and max content line disappear from the canvas when you exit face-placement editing mode, leaving only the crop box visible.

Dragging a photo layer that has both face placement and a crop box moves the photo and its crop together as one unit, so the framing you set up is preserved — you can reposition the whole assembly in the design without having to re-draw the crop afterwards.

Choosing between the three modes

Related articles

• Consistent team faces: what face placement does and when to use it
• Setting up face placement on a template
• Detecting faces and tuning placement
• Building a team photo: align, distribute, arrange
• Adding photos to a design