Crop an image into a circle online — a profile picture, a forum avatar, one face taken out of a group shot. PIXLFLW works entirely in your browser: the photo is cut locally and never uploaded to a server.
What you can do
- Circle or oval — Circle squares the frame first and cuts the largest circle that fits it; Oval keeps the frame you have and inscribes an ellipse.
- Transparent outside — the corners are cut away rather than painted over, so a PNG drops onto any background.
- A ring around the edge — any width and colour, drawn inside the circle so the file never clips it.
- An exact output size — type 512 and the file comes out 512 × 512, whatever the source measured.
- Your own framing — the crop step above this one moves the square; the circle follows it.
How to crop a photo into a circle
- Drop an image into the upload area (formats: GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG, WEBP, HEIC, TIFF).
- Drag the square onto the part you want, then set the output size.
- Download as PNG — that is the format that keeps the outside transparent.
Transparency, and what JPG does to it
JPG has no alpha channel. Save a circle as JPG and the area around it has to become some colour, so choose that colour here with the background option instead of leaving it to the encoder. PNG and WEBP keep the transparency. PDF does not.
What size an avatar should be
Services re-encode whatever you send them, so no single size is right everywhere. One square file at 512 × 512 covers all of them: the picture is usually shown somewhere between 40 and 200 px, and anything smaller than that gets upscaled by the service and goes soft. Put 512 in the output size and the file is written at exactly that.
Circle crop or rounded corners
Rounding the corners keeps the rectangle and softens it. This tool changes the frame to a square and throws the corners away. If you want a card with soft edges rather than an avatar, round the corners instead.