A method and system for cropping an image is provided. The cropping system automatically crops an image by selecting an image template whose condition is best satisfied by the image and then by selecting a cropping of the image that best attains the goal of the selected image template. The cropping system may use a metric or objective function to rate how well a cropping attains the goal of the selected image template. The cropping system may apply various optimization algorithms to identify a cropping that is the best as indicated by the metric. The cropping system can then automatically crop the image based on the identified cropping.