Transparency is the whole point
Cutting a circle out of a photograph is easy. Getting the corners to be genuinely empty rather than white is the part most tools get wrong, and it is the only reason to use a dedicated tool at all.
A round image with white corners looks fine on a white page and terrible everywhere else — a dark theme, a coloured slide, a photograph behind it. Real transparency means the corners contain nothing, so whatever sits behind the image shows through. This tool masks the canvas to a circle before exporting, so the area outside the circle carries an alpha value of zero.
The format decides. PNG and WebP store an alpha channel and keep the corners empty. JPEG has no alpha channel at all, so if you export a circle as JPEG the corners must be filled with something. That single fact explains almost every “why is my avatar still square” question.
Choosing a size
| Size | Good for |
|---|---|
| 128 × 128 | Forum avatars, comment badges, favicons for apps |
| 256 × 256 | Chat apps, small profile images, email signatures |
| 512 × 512 | The safe default — sharp on retina screens, accepted everywhere |
| 1024 × 1024 | Press kits, printed material, anything shown large |
| Original | Keeps the selected circle at its native resolution |
512 pixels is the answer for most people. Almost every platform downscales what you upload, so a larger file usually just means a slower upload for the same result. The exception is anything that will also be printed or shown at full width, where the extra resolution genuinely helps.
Placing the circle
Drag the circle to move it and use the four handles to resize it. It stays a perfect circle whatever you do — there is no way to accidentally produce an oval, because the selection is locked to a square.
Two things worth knowing about framing a face. Leave a little space above the head rather than cropping tight to the hairline; a circle that clips the top of someone's head reads as a mistake. And place the eyes slightly above the centre of the circle rather than dead centre, which is where a portrait naturally sits and why “Centre the circle” is a starting point rather than an answer.
For a photograph where the subject is off to one side, resist the urge to centre. Move the circle onto the face and let the rest of the image fall outside it.
The optional ring
A ring around the edge does one useful job: it separates the avatar from whatever is behind it. On a busy background, or when the photo's own edges are dark and the page is dark too, a thin light ring stops the image from dissolving into the layout.
Thickness is set as a percentage of the diameter rather than in pixels, so the ring stays visually consistent whether you export at 128 or 1024. Around 3–5% looks deliberate; beyond about 10% the ring starts competing with the photograph. The ring is drawn inside the circle's edge, so it never gets clipped and never extends past the transparent boundary.
When you do not need this at all
Plenty of platforms apply their own circular mask to whatever you upload — they take a square image and display it round. If that is your only destination, a square crop works perfectly well and you can skip this step.
The round file matters when you need the shape to survive outside a platform that provides it: a logo overlay, a slide deck, a printed programme, an email signature, a website you are building yourself, or any site that flattens uploads without masking them. In those cases the transparency has to be in the file, because nothing downstream will add it for you.
Everything here runs in your browser. The photo is decoded, displayed and masked on your own device, so nothing is uploaded, there is no file size ceiling, and no account is needed.