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How to Crop a Photo Into a Circle for an Avatar

July 16, 2026 · AXS IMG Team

Most avatars are round, but almost every photo is a rectangle. A circle crop cuts your image into a perfect circle with transparent corners, so it drops cleanly into any profile slot without a square box around it.

How to do it

  1. Open Circle Crop and add your photo.
  2. It's cropped to a centred circle, and the corners become transparent.
  3. Download the PNG.

Why the result is a PNG

The corners outside the circle have to be see-through, and only formats with transparency — like PNG — can store that. That's why a circle-cropped image is always a PNG, never a JPG (which would fill the corners with a solid colour).

Get the cleanest circle

Start from a roughly square photo with the subject centred, so nothing important is cut off when the circle is applied. If your photo is a wide rectangle, crop it to a square first, then circle-crop.

Want soft corners instead of a full circle? Round Image Corners gives you a gentle curve rather than a complete circle. Everything runs in your browser, so your photo stays private.

Try Circle Crop Image

Crop an image into a circle with a transparent background — perfect for avatars.

Open Circle Crop Image