I need to do a crab cleaning pictorial.  I can tell you how to do it in the mean time.  The crabs we get are blue crabs. They have the shell which has a point on its left and right sides.

I prefer to clean crabs when they are ice cold and unable to move. I feel this is more humane for the animal and easier for me.  You can boil crabs without cleaning them first. It really don't matter, but if you have friends eating with you who don't know how to pick a crab, you will just end up cleaning them all for them anyway. A cleaned crab will take up more flavor from the seasoning in the boiling water or the season sprinkled on them before steaming or broiling.

If fresh crabs are active and feisty, give them a few minutes in crushed ice or ice water. They will appear dead, but will revive when warmed.  Never eat a dead crab. If you have crabs stored in ice, lay them out and let them start to warm. If after warming up, they do not start to sluggishly move and remain limp, obviously dead, discard them. Keeping live crabs in water will kill them. Always keep live crabs on ice with the water drained off.

Hold the crab by its long pointed legs in one of your hands. With the heel of the other hand, lift the shell up away from the body in a steady push, removing it completely. A thin glove will prevent the point from trying to stick you.

Claws may be removed if you wish, by bending the claw arm downward from the crab until it snaps out of the socket in the crab body.  Leaving them on or removing them makes no difference.

Next you will see the lungs of the crab, arraigned from the lower part of the inner body and sticking upward toward the top of the pretty white inner structure. They range from white to dingy colored and are not something you want to eat. Remove those with a knife (even a dull butter knife) by scraping downward, folding them down and scraping them off clean.

There are two tiny pieces of shell near the rear of the inner crab body, at the rear of the gut compartment, just over both rear flippers. Snap those tiny pieces off with the point of the knife by moving the knife tip from inside the gut compartment toward the rear flippers. This allows easier clearing of the gut compartment. With your finger, with the assist of running water if available, remove the guts. The guts and fat contained there are not a problem if you don't get them all.

Next, using the knife, cut the mouth flaps off by cutting just the leading edge of the lower part of the crabs shell where the mouth is attached, and remove the two long feather looking appendages while you are at it.

Remove the lower plate of the crab which covers the reproduction appendages under the crab, on the bottom of the shell. Stick a knife point under it and just peel it back and pull it away.

The crab is ready to boil, steam, or broil now, but some people like to remove the legs. Do this carefully by cutting through the legs between the first joint and the crab body. Do not pull on these to remove them because they will pull good meat out of the crab. Always cut them clean between joints. Be especially careful to cut off the back flippers and not pull them off. There is a huge piece of meat connected to those and it is the biggest treat in eating a crab.

After cooking, to make picking the meat easier, break the crab in half across the gut compartment, then slice the peak half of the top of the inside shell off of the main body horizontally across the crab body using a sharp knife. You can do this with the crab left whole, but sometimes it makes handling a little easier. This gives you two halves (or 4 halves if you have broken the crab body in half) of the crab with meat in both halves, and opens the chambers of meat up for easier picking.  More later when I can add photos of the process.