Circle crop — cut a photo into a round profile picture

How to use Circle Crop

1. Choose one or more photos.
2. Set Keep which part: Centre, Top, Bottom, Left or Right.
3. Leave Save as on PNG so the area outside the circle is transparent.
4. Press Apply and download the round image.

What it does and when to use it

Round pictures are the standard shape for people on team pages, speaker lists, testimonials sections, chat apps and email signatures. This tool makes one in a single step from any photo, without lining up a crop by hand.

Keep which part matters for photos that are not square. A tall portrait usually wants Top, so the head stays in and the body is cut. A wide group photo can keep the left or right person.

To choose a square around a face precisely, use the image cropper first. To round a rectangle’s corners without cutting it to a circle, use Round Corners. If you need a plain background behind the person first, the background remover can take it away.

How it works

1. The tool finds the largest square that fits in the photo: its side is the shorter of width and height.
2. It places that square by your choice. Centre takes the middle; Top takes the square from the top edge; Left from the left edge, and so on.
3. It copies that square out and applies a circular mask with a radius of half the side. Pixels outside the circle become transparent, and pixels on the edge are made partly transparent by how much of them the circle covers, so the outline is smooth.

No pixels are scaled, so the circle keeps the full detail of the original. EXIF rotation from phone cameras is applied first, so the photo is the right way up. The work runs in a background worker on your device, and the photo is not uploaded.

Worked examples

These sizes follow the steps above.

• A 1200 × 800 landscape, Centre. The square is 800 × 800, taken from x = 200, so 200 px are dropped from each side. The result is an 800 × 800 PNG with a circle of 800 px diameter.
• An 800 × 1200 portrait, Top. The square is the top 800 × 800 of the photo, keeping the head and shoulders and dropping the bottom 400 px.
• A 1080 × 1080 square photo. Nothing is cropped; only the corners outside the circle become transparent.

Limits and tips

• The output is as big as the photo’s short side. For a small avatar, resize the result afterwards with the image resizer.
• Several photos can be done in one run; each uses the same Keep which part setting.
• Keep a little space above the head; the curve cuts the top corners first.