Circle Crop Image

Why the corners need to be transparent

Every image file is a rectangle. A "round" picture is a square whose corners are transparent, so that whatever sits behind it — a web page, a slide, a document — shows through and only the circle is visible. That requires a format with an alpha channel. PNG and WebP have one; JPEG does not.

This is the most common reason a circle crop goes wrong. Save the round crop as a JPEG, or let a converter flatten it, and the corners become white. On a white page you will not notice; on a coloured slide or a dark-mode email you get a white square with a circle in it. So PNG is the default here, WebP is offered as a smaller alternative, and JPEG is available only with a corner colour you choose deliberately — useful when you know the exact background it will sit on.

The edge of the circle is antialiased: pixels on the boundary are partly transparent, so the curve is smooth rather than stepped. The page builds the mask by compositing rather than by clipping, because the clip edge is not antialiased in every browser.

Do you need to crop it yourself?

Often you do not. Most social networks and messaging apps — Instagram, LinkedIn, X, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams and many more — take a square upload and display it inside a circle themselves. For those, upload a square crop with the face centred and some space around it; a pre-cut circle works too, but gives you nothing extra.

A pre-cut circular PNG earns its keep where nothing will crop it for you: a team or about page on a website, an email signature, a slide deck, a printed badge, a forum or app that shows the file exactly as uploaded, or an image you want to place over a coloured background in a design. The square option in this tool is there for the first case — a clean, centred square at an exact size.

Platforms change their recommended sizes from time to time, so check current guidance for the specific site. As a durable rule, 400 × 400 pixels is enough for nearly any profile picture, and 800 or 1080 keeps it sharp on high-density screens and in places where it is shown large.

Framing a face in a circle

A circle hides more of a square than people expect — about 21% of the area, all of it at the corners. Hair, ears and chins near the edge of the square get cut, so leave space. For a head-and-shoulders portrait, the eyes should sit a little above the centre, with the top of the head close to but inside the circle and a sliver of shoulders at the bottom.

Drag the photo inside the frame to position it, and zoom with the slider (or the plus and minus keys when the frame has focus; arrow keys nudge). The dimmed area shows what will be removed, and the small result preview next to it shows the finished crop exactly as it will be saved, transparency and all.

Zooming in uses fewer of the photo's pixels. The page works out how many original pixels are inside the crop, and warns you if the output size you chose is much larger than that — a 1080-pixel output from a 300-pixel region will look soft.

Border rings and rounded squares

A border ring draws a band of colour just inside the edge of the shape. It is measured as a percentage of the image width, so a 3% ring is 12 pixels at 400 and 32 at 1080. A white ring lifts a photo off a dark background; a brand-coloured ring is common on team pages and event graphics. The ring sits inside the shape, so the outer size of the image does not change.

The rounded-square shape suits app-style icons, product thumbnails and avatars on sites that use squares with softened corners. Roundness sets the corner radius as a share of the width, from a gentle 2% to a full 50%, which becomes a circle. It is a true rounded rectangle; the continuous-curvature "squircle" used for phone app icons is a slightly different shape, and app stores apply their own masks to icon uploads anyway.

Sizes, formats and privacy

Choose 400, 800 or 1080 pixels, Largest the photo allows (which uses every original pixel inside the crop, up to 4096), or a custom size. Output is always square. PNG files of photographs are larger than JPEGs — a 400-pixel round portrait is typically 150–300 KB — and WebP is usually around a third of that, with transparency kept, in browsers that can encode it; where one cannot, the page saves PNG and tells you.

Saving re-encodes the image, which removes its EXIF metadata, including any GPS location. The photo is cropped on your device and never uploaded — a reasonable expectation for a picture of your face.