Crop an Image into a Circle
Position a circle over your photo, size it with a drag, and export a round image with a transparent outside - ready for avatars, team pages, stamps and badges. An optional ring border can be added before download. The cutter is free, and your portrait is processed locally rather than passing through a server.
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How it works
- Add your photo to the canvas.
- Drag and resize the circle until the framing looks right.
- Optionally add a colored ring border and set its thickness.
- Download the round PNG with transparency.
Worth knowing
A circular image is really a square image wearing a mask: the pixels inside the circle keep their colors, and everything outside becomes transparent via the alpha channel. That mechanism dictates the file format. PNG and WebP carry alpha; JPEG does not, so a circle saved as JPEG grows a solid background - usually white - and stops being a circle the moment it lands on a colored page. This tool therefore exports PNG by default.
Before reaching for the mask at all, check whether you need it. Most platforms - Slack, X, LinkedIn, GitHub, virtually every chat app - apply their own circular mask to whatever square you upload. For those, the winning move is uploading a square with the face centered and some margin, letting the platform do the rounding. Pre-cropped circles are for places that do not mask: email signatures, presentation slides, printed name badges, your own website.
Edge quality separates good circle crops from cheap ones. A hard binary mask produces visibly jagged stair-steps along the curve; the mask here is anti-aliased, meaning edge pixels get partial transparency, which reads as a smooth arc at any size. The optional ring border serves a practical purpose beyond decoration - a 2-4 pixel ring keeps a light-background portrait from dissolving into a light page.
Frame with the mask in mind. Corners vanish by definition, and the usable area hugs the center: a face should sit with eyes slightly above the circle midline and enough headroom that hair is not tangent to the arc. If your subject sits off-center in the source, move the circle rather than the expectation - the preview shows precisely what survives.
A circle covers only pi/4 - about 78.5 percent - of its bounding square, and the transparent corners compress to almost nothing, so a circle-cropped PNG frequently comes out smaller than a square crop of the identical region.
What this tool will not do
- It will not output a circular JPEG - JPEG has no transparency, so the round shape only survives in PNG or WebP.
- It will not remove the background inside the circle; anything within the arc stays, including clutter behind your subject.
- It will not produce ovals or rounded rectangles - the mask is a true circle only.
Questions people ask
How do I crop a picture into a circle without Photoshop?
Drop the photo here, position the circle, download the PNG - three steps, no software. The output has genuine transparency, so it sits cleanly on any background color.
Why does my circle image show a white box around it?
Somewhere along the way it was converted to JPEG, which cannot store transparency and fills it with white. Re-export as PNG and make sure whatever platform you upload to does not force JPEG conversion.
What size should a circular profile picture be?
Export at 400x400 px or larger - platforms display circles small but zoom them on tap, and downscaling is always cleaner than upscaling. For print (badges, stickers), go 1000 px and up.
Do I need to circle-crop before uploading a profile photo to LinkedIn or Slack?
No - those platforms mask uploads into circles themselves. Upload a well-centered square instead. Pre-cropped circles are for destinations that leave images as-is, like slides and email signatures.
Can I add a border ring around the circle?
Yes - pick a color and thickness before export. A thin ring of 2 to 4 pixels adds definition against backgrounds similar in tone to your photo edges.
Why do the edges of my circle look jagged on other tools?
They used a hard mask with no anti-aliasing, so edge pixels are fully on or off. This tool feathers the boundary pixels with partial alpha, producing a smooth curve even at large display sizes.
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