Circle crop a photo into a round avatar

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

Choose files

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.

Put the face in the circle

The page opens with “Circle” under “Shape” and “Transparent” under “Behind the shape”, and “Output size” under “More settings” already reads “400 × 400”. The circle starts in the middle of the photo, as wide as its shorter side, which leaves a face small in a group shot or a full-length picture. Drag the outline over the face, then lower “Size”, from 100 down to 10 percent, until head and shoulders fill it. The avatar under the photo follows every change; the checkerboard around it is real transparency, and the file downloads as photo-circle.png.

Keep 400 pixels of real detail

The 400 × 400 file is the circle scaled to that size, down or up, and a circle narrower than 400 pixels in the original photo is enlarged and comes out soft. On a 1280 × 800 photo that happens once “Size” drops below 50 percent; a 4000 × 3000 photo stays above 400 pixels down to 14 percent. If a site names another size in its upload hint, switch “Output size” to “256 × 256”, “512 × 512” or “1024 × 1024”; “Original” keeps the circle at the photo's own resolution.

A border that survives the downscale

“Border width” is counted in pixels of the original photo, before the circle is scaled to 400. On a 1280 × 800 photo the circle is 800 pixels across, so a 16-pixel ring comes out 8 pixels wide in the avatar; on a 4000 × 3000 photo even the widest ring, 64 pixels, ends up at about 8.5 pixels. Where a site crops avatars to a circle itself, the corners go anyway; the transparent ones matter where nothing crops for you, such as an email signature, a slide or a team page.

Making the avatar on a phone

On a phone the outline moves with a finger, and the photo is read by the phone's browser, so a selfie never leaves the device. A HEIC file is not accepted; HEIC to JPG converts it first. On an iPhone the download opens the Share sheet, where Save to Files keeps the PNG as it is; Android saves it to Downloads. In our check on October 20, 2026, the 400 × 400 PNG cut from a 1280 × 800 photo weighed 41 kB. Where a site wants no transparency at all, pick “White” under “Behind the shape” before you download.

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.