Make Round Image

It crops to the centre, so centre your subject first

The thing to know before anything else, because it is where results go wrong.

A circle needs a square to sit in, so the image is cropped to a square from the middle outward before the shape is applied. A wide photo loses both sides. A tall photo loses the top and bottom. You cannot choose which part is kept — it is always the centre.

That is perfect if your subject is already in the middle of the frame, which for a deliberately taken headshot it usually is. It goes wrong when the subject is off to one side, which is most casual photos: a face in the left third of a landscape shot will be half outside the circle, or gone.

The fix is one step: use Crop Image first to cut a square with your subject centred in it, then round that. Thirty seconds, and it is the difference between a portrait and a picture of someone's ear.

Worth knowing what to aim for while cropping: for a profile picture, leave a little space above the head and crop somewhere around the chest, with the eyes roughly a third of the way down. A circle crops the corners away, so anything near a corner of your square — a hand, a shoulder, a logo — will disappear.

For most social profiles, do not do this at all

Honest advice that costs this page a visit, and it will save you a worse result.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Slack, WhatsApp, Teams and Google all round your profile picture themselves. They take a square and display it in a circle. If you upload an already-circular PNG, they round it a second time — so the edge of your circle gets clipped by theirs, and you lose a ring of the image and often get a hard or fringed edge where a clean one should be.

For those, upload a square and let the platform round it. Crop Image to a square is all you need.

The real uses for a pre-rounded image are the places that do not round it for you: a website or email signature where you control the HTML, a team page you are building, a document or presentation, a printed flyer or business card, a video overlay, an app icon, a CV, a PDF, or any platform that displays your picture as a plain square.

If you are not sure, upload a square first and look. If it comes out circular, you are done.

Circle or rounded square, and the radius

Circle is the default and the familiar profile-picture shape.

Rounded Rectangle gives you softened corners rather than a full circle, with a radius slider from 1 to 50 per cent. One thing to be clear about: the result is still square, because the square crop happens either way. So this is a rounded square, not a rounded version of your original rectangle — if you were hoping to keep a wide image wide with soft corners, this will not do that.

Useful settings on that slider:

Around 5 to 10 per cent is the barely-there softening used on cards, thumbnails and list items. It reads as polish rather than as a shape.

Around 20 to 25 per cent — 20 is the default — is the modern app icon look, the rounded square every phone home screen uses.

Around 40 per cent is a heavily rounded squircle, distinctive and still recognisably not a circle.

At 50 per cent the radius equals half the side, which makes a circle. So the top of the slider simply duplicates circle mode.

Transparent, or a colour

The corners the shape cuts away have to become something, and this is where a rounded image succeeds or looks broken.

Transparent is the default and correct whenever you control where the image will sit — a web page, a slide, a design file. The corners are genuinely empty, so the image adapts to whatever is behind it.

But transparency is not universal. Choose White or a Custom colour instead when the destination will not honour it: some email clients, some older document software, anything that will convert your PNG to JPEG, and most print workflows. In those, a transparent corner turns white or black without asking you, and black corners on a circle look like a mistake.

The trick with a custom colour is to match the background it will sit on exactly. Sample the page's background colour and the circle will look as though it was cut for that spot — which is also the workaround for a destination that flattens transparency.

Why the file is a PNG, and what that costs

The output is always a PNG, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. A JPEG cannot store transparency at all, so saving a circular image as one would fill the corners with white or black and defeat the point.

The cost is size. PNG compresses photographs far less efficiently than JPEG, so a circular photo can come out several times larger than the original — which matters if it is going on a web page. Two practical answers: resize before rounding rather than after, since a profile picture rarely needs to be more than a few hundred pixels across, and if the destination does not need transparency, consider a white background and converting to JPEG afterwards.

Resize Image will bring it down to size first, which is the better order — rounding a small image is faster and the result is exactly what you will use.

Everything happens in your browser. No upload, no watermark, no account, and the preview shows the finished shape before you commit.

Related tools

Crop Image is the step to take first, and often the only step you need if the platform rounds your picture for you. Resize Image brings the file down to a sensible size before rounding. Remove Background from Image cuts the subject out entirely, which is the other way to get a clean avatar — and it pairs well with this one.