Circle Crop

Crop an image into a circle. Transparent PNG, square output.

Drag & drop files here, or click to select

Your file never leaves your device · No signup · No daily limit

Up to 100 MB per file

How it works

Drop a photo. It stays in this browser tab and is never uploaded to a server.
Drag the circle over the face or logo, and drag its edge to resize it.
Download a square PNG whose corners are fully transparent.

How it works

Drop a PNG, JPG or WebP image: a headshot, a logo, or a screenshot all work.
Move the circle over the part you want to keep and set how wide it should be. The largest circle available is as wide as the shorter side of the image.
Check the preview. By default everything outside the circle is cleared rather than painted, so what you see around the edge is what the file will contain: and if you need the corners filled instead, switch Background to a solid colour.
Download the PNG. The file is square with the circle inside it: by default its side equals the circle's diameter, and the Output size (px) box lets you pin another figure instead: 128, 256, 400, 512, or anything from 16 to 4096.

What people use it for

Making a round profile picture for a site, forum or app that does not mask avatars for you.
Dropping a headshot into a slide, a document or an email signature without a white box around it.
Cutting a round logo or badge out of a square export so it can sit on a coloured or photographic background.
Preparing a circular image for a print layout, a sticker sheet or a button die-cut where the corners must be empty.

Good to know

Cropping cannot create detail. The circle keeps the original pixels inside it and discards the rest, so setting an output size larger than the selected area only enlarges what was there. The tool says so under the box when you do it. A small circle taken from a low-resolution photo is still a small circle, however large you export it.
The circle can never be wider than the shorter side of the image. On a 1600 × 900 photo the widest possible circle is 900 px across, so the left and right of the frame necessarily fall outside it.
Transparency only survives in formats that store it. Wherever your PNG is re-encoded as JPEG (and many upload flows do exactly that) the corners come back as a solid colour, usually white or black.
The circle edge is anti-aliased, so it is a thin band of partly transparent pixels rather than a hard step. At very small output sizes that band is a visible share of the image and the edge can read as soft, especially against a strongly contrasting background.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the result a transparent PNG?

Because a circle inside a square file has to leave the corners as nothing at all. If they were filled with white the image would only look round on a white page, and would show four bright triangles anywhere else. PNG stores an alpha channel, so the corners are genuinely empty; JPEG has no alpha channel and cannot hold that. For apps that render transparency as black, there is also an option to fill the corners with a solid colour instead.

I uploaded it somewhere and the corners turned white or black. What happened?

That site re-encoded your file: usually to JPEG, which has no way to store transparency, so the empty corners were flattened to a solid colour. Nothing is wrong with the PNG itself; check whether the destination accepts PNG, or accept the flattening if the platform masks the avatar into a circle anyway.

What size should I export for a WhatsApp or Discord profile picture?

Both apply their own circular mask to a square upload, so the size matters more than the shape. A square export of roughly 512 px is a comfortable answer for either: apps display avatars far smaller than that but request a higher-resolution copy on sharp screens. A 96 px crop looks soft the moment anything shows it larger, and there is no benefit to a 4000 px avatar beyond a bigger upload.

Is my image uploaded anywhere?

No. The image is decoded and the circle is masked on a canvas in your browser, so the photo never leaves your device and there is nothing stored on a server.

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