Crop Image to Circle
Crop an image to a circle: drag a square over the part you want, and everything outside the circle turns clear. Save a round PNG or WebP, free in your browser.
What is a circle crop?
A circle crop keeps a round part of a picture and makes everything outside it transparent. Most social sites and chat apps show profile pictures as circles, but the file you upload is still square; the site just hides the corners.
Doing the circle crop yourself shows you exactly what people will see. You also get a round image with clear corners for a slide or a sticker, where a square photo would show its background.
How to crop an image to a circle
The tool starts on the largest square in the middle of the picture, outlined by a circle, with everything outside the circle dimmed. Drag across the picture to draw a new square. It starts where you press, grows with the longer side of your drag, and slides back inside the picture when it hits an edge.
Width is the diameter of the saved image in pixels. Format offers PNG and WebP, plus AVIF where your browser can write it, and the lossy formats get a Quality slider. Hit Download to save, or Open in Studio to keep working on it in the editor.
Settings for an email signature, a team page and a social profile
Email signature headshot: Width 200 and PNG. If the signature shows the photo 100 px wide, twice that keeps it sharp on high-density screens. PNG matters here. The classic Outlook for Windows shows neither WebP images nor CSS rounded corners, so a photo that should look round there has to be a round PNG.
Team page or author box on a website: Width 400 and WebP at Quality 80. That keeps the corners clear in a much smaller file than PNG, and every current browser shows it.
Social profile picture: those sites round the photo for you, so upload a square from Crop Image at 1:1. Use this page only to preview what the circle will leave out.
How does the tool turn a square into a circle?
With a mask. The square is drawn at the size you set and then masked with a circle that touches all four of its sides. That uses the canvas mode destination-in, one of the compositing operators Thomas Porter and Tom Duff described in 1984. Each pixel keeps as much of itself as the circle covers, so the pixels on the rim come out partly transparent and the edge looks smooth.
A circle covers π/4 of the square it fits in, so the four corners hold about 21.5 percent of the area. At Width 400 that's roughly 33,600 pixels turning fully clear, plus about 1,460 on the rim that end up partly clear.
Why does a circle crop in Word or PowerPoint come out as an oval?
Crop to Shape in Word and PowerPoint fits the shape to the picture, and Microsoft's help says the picture keeps its own proportions. On a photo that isn't square, the circle gets stretched into an oval. Crop the photo square first and the same command gives you a circle.
This page can't make an oval at all. Every drag becomes a square before anything's cut, sized by the longer side of the drag. A drag 800 pixels across and 200 down still gives you an 800-pixel square, and the saved file is as tall as it is wide.
Why did my round picture get black corners?
A service that converts every upload to JPG has nowhere to keep transparency, so the clear corners turn into a solid color, often black or white. That missing alpha channel is also why this page doesn't offer JPG. Sites that do this usually round or crop the picture themselves, so a square upload looks cleaner there.
PNG keeps the partly see-through pixels on the rim exactly, and that's what makes the edge look smooth on any background. If you want a ring around the photo, load the round PNG into Add Outline to Image. Its stroke follows the circle, so you get a ring of one even width.