Crop an Image Into a Circle
Turns any photo into a round image with genuinely transparent corners, ready to drop onto a slide, a website, or a team page without a white square around it. The largest centerd square is taken from each image and masked to a circle, so nothing is stretched, and you can add a border in one step. Batch friendly and entirely local.
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Add to Chrome — freeWhat it does
- True transparent corners in PNG output
- Optional colored border ring
- Set the exact output diameter
- Batch processing with ZIP download
- No account and no watermark
How to use Circle Crop
- 1
Set the diameter
512 pixels suits most avatars and slide graphics. Larger is fine if the source is big enough; enlarging beyond the original only softens it.
- 2
Add a border if you want one
Set a border width above zero and pick a color. The ring is drawn on the circle's edge rather than outside it, so the output stays exactly the diameter you asked for.
- 3
Drop your images in
Add one file or a whole set. Each is center-cropped to a square and then masked, so a batch of mixed shapes all come out consistent.
- 4
Save as PNG
Keep the file as PNG. Converting it to JPG afterwards would fill the transparent corners with a solid color and undo the entire effect.
How it works
Three operations, in this order.
Center square. A circle needs a square to sit in, and taking the largest centerd square from the source is the only way to get one without distorting the picture. A 2400 by 3600 portrait yields a 2400 by 2400 region; a 3000 by 2000 landscape yields 2000 by 2000. This is a real crop and pixels outside it are discarded.
Step down. If the square is much larger than the output diameter, it is halved repeatedly before the final draw. Scaling a 2400-pixel square straight into 512 pixels in one step samples roughly one pixel in five, which leaves a visibly crunchy edge on hair and fabric. Halving averages instead.
Mask. A circular path is added to the canvas and set as the clipping region, then the image is drawn. Everything outside the path is simply never written, so the corners keep the canvas's initial state, which is fully transparent. This is what makes the transparency real rather than painted.
The optional border is stroked afterwards on the same circle. Canvas centers a stroke on its path, so a 8-pixel ring would extend 4 pixels beyond the clip and be cut off. Insetting the circle by half the border width puts the whole ring inside the canvas and keeps the output at exactly the requested diameter.
When you'd use this
Team and about pages, where a row of round headshots at matching sizes looks considered and a row of mismatched rectangles does not.
Slide decks and documents, where a round photo drops cleanly over a colored background or a photograph without an obvious box.
Avatars for platforms that display round but accept square uploads. Most of them mask to a circle at display time anyway, so pre-cropping is unnecessary — the exception is anywhere the image is also shown as a square, or downloaded by someone else, where having the circle baked in matters.
Design assets generally: a round crop is a common component in badges, stickers, and icon sets, and doing it here is faster than opening a full editor to apply one mask.
The mistake to avoid
Do not save the result as JPEG, and do not run it through a JPG converter afterwards. The moment it becomes a JPEG the transparent corners must be filled with something, and that something will be white or black. On a white page the damage is invisible, which is exactly why it gets noticed only after the image has been used somewhere with a colored background.
If you need a smaller file and the destination supports it, WebP also stores transparency and is considerably smaller than PNG. That is the only safe alternative here.
Examples
A headshot for a team page
The center square of a tall portrait sits around the chest and shoulders, so a face near the top of the frame can end up cut. Cropping the photo to a square with the face centerd first, then running it through here, gives a much better result than relying on the automatic center.
A logo mark with a white ring for a dark page
The border is drawn inset by half its width, which keeps the finished image exactly 256 pixels rather than 264. Stroking a path in a canvas centers the line on the path, so without that inset half the ring would be clipped away by the very circle it is tracing.
Frequently asked questions
Why must the output be PNG?
Because no image file is actually round. A circular image is a square file whose corners are transparent, and only formats with an alpha channel can store that. PNG can, and WebP can. JPEG cannot, so saving as JPEG would fill the corners with white or black and give you back a square with a circle drawn on it.
My subject is off-center and got cut off. Can I choose the position?
Not in this tool, which always takes the center square so that a batch comes out consistent. For a single image where the subject is off-center, use the image cropper first with the square ratio locked, position the selection where you want it, then bring that square here. Two steps, and full control over the framing.
Will it look right on a dark background?
Yes, because the corners are truly transparent rather than filled with white. This is the difference between a proper circle crop and one made by drawing a white ring over a square, which looks correct on a white page and shows an obvious box on any other color.
What size should I use for a profile picture?
512 pixels is comfortable for almost every platform and keeps the file small. Some sites display avatars at 400 pixels on high-density screens, so going below 400 is where softness starts to show. There is no benefit to exporting at 2000 pixels for a slot that displays at 96.
Can I do a whole folder of staff photos at once?
Yes, and that is the case this tool is built for. Every image gets the same diameter and the same border, which is what makes a team page look deliberate rather than assembled. Drop them all in and download the set as a single ZIP archive.