Crop Image into a Circle

Cut a circle, an oval or a rounded square out of any photo and download it as a PNG with a genuinely transparent background.

Drop your files here

.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp, .avif, .bmp · up to 100 MB

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How to Crop to Circle

1
Drop your photo
Add one image or up to twenty at once. JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and BMP all work, and the file is read inside this browser tab.
2
Move and size the circle
The circle starts centred and as large as the photo allows. Change its centre, its radius, the background behind it and the border around it.
3
Download the transparent PNG
Save the result at its natural size or at a ready avatar size. Several files come back together as one ZIP archive.

Why the result is a PNG

Everything outside the circle has to become nothing at all, and only a format with an alpha channel can store nothing. PNG has one, JPEG does not: a JPEG has to give every pixel a colour, so the area outside the circle would come back as a black or white square with a circle painted in the middle of it. That is why the format choice only appears once you pick a solid background. At that point there is no transparency left to lose, and a JPEG becomes a reasonable, much smaller option.

An avatar is usually 400 or 512 pixels

Most profile pictures are displayed inside a circular frame at a few hundred pixels across, so uploading a 4000 pixel photo just makes the browser downscale it again on the other side. The output size list covers the sizes that platforms actually use (256, 400, 512 and 1024), and the downscale here runs with high-quality smoothing, which usually looks better than whatever the receiving site does automatically. Combining a circle crop with a fixed size is what turns a snapshot into a profile picture in one pass.

Circles, ovals and rounded squares

A circle is what most profile frames expect. A rounded square is what app icons and card layouts expect, and its corner rounding runs from a barely softened corner at 1 percent all the way to a full circle at 50 percent. At that point half the side equals the inscribed radius, so the shape and a circle are the same thing. An oval covers the cases in between, where a face sits taller than it is wide and a true circle would cut the chin off.

The edge is smoothed, not stair-stepped

A hard-clipped circle leaves a visible staircase along the edge, which is obvious the moment the PNG is placed over a coloured background. The mask here is applied with a half-pixel blur, so the outermost ring of pixels carries a partial alpha value instead of jumping from fully opaque to fully transparent. In a 2000 pixel circle that soft ring is roughly 27,000 pixels wide in total: invisible as a blur, decisive for how clean the edge looks.

The photo never leaves this tab

Decoding, masking and re-encoding all happen locally through the Canvas API. No copy of your photo is uploaded, queued or stored anywhere, and closing the tab is enough to remove every trace of it.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the result a PNG and not a JPG?

Only PNG can store transparency. A JPEG has to assign a colour to every pixel, so the area outside the circle would be filled in rather than left empty. If you choose a solid white, black or custom background, transparency is no longer needed and the JPG option becomes available.

Will the background really be transparent?

Yes. Everything outside the shape has an alpha value of zero, which viewers and editors show as a checkerboard and websites show as whatever is behind the image. Some chat apps and older document editors flatten transparency onto white when they display the file. That is their doing, not the file's.

How do I make a 400 by 400 profile picture?

Leave the shape as a circle, set the output size to 400 by 400 and download. The circle is fitted to the shorter side of your photo by default, so a portrait or landscape shot is cropped to its centre square first and then scaled to exactly 400 pixels.

Can I add a border around the circle?

Yes, up to 64 pixels wide in any colour. The mask shrinks by half the border width so the ring sits fully inside the image instead of being cut in half by the edge of the canvas, so a 12 pixel border on a 1489 pixel circle comes out as a full 12 pixels of solid colour.

What is the rounded square shape for?

App icons, card thumbnails and some messaging platforms use a square with softened corners rather than a circle. The corner rounding is set as a percentage of the side, so 24 percent gives a typical icon shape and 50 percent gives a shape indistinguishable from a circle.

Does cropping to a circle lose quality?

The pixels inside the circle are copied across untouched, so nothing is resampled unless you also pick an output size. PNG is a lossless format, so what you see inside the circle is exactly what was in the original photo.

How many photos can I do at once?

Up to twenty. In a batch the circle is fitted to the centre of each photo at its own natural size, because a radius that suits one image would sit off-centre on the next. The results download together as a single ZIP archive.

Does this work on a phone?

Yes. The whole tool runs on browser APIs that mobile Chrome and Safari have supported for years, and a phone photo of ten or twelve megapixels is well within what a modern handset handles comfortably.