Crop an Image — Rectangle, Circle & Shapes
Drag a crop box or mask a perfect circle, and download a PNG whose corners are actually transparent.
The crop is drawn on a canvas in this tab — the image is never uploadedCrop a photo into a circle and save a PNG with a transparent background
or drag & drop it here, or paste it from your clipboard (Ctrl+V). Nothing is uploaded — the image opens right here in this tab.
PNG · JPG · WebP · GIF · AVIF
Preview
Choose an image and your crop shows up here. Drag across the photo to draw the area, drag inside it to move it, and use the corners to resize. Works with a mouse and with touch.
Drag to select · inside to move · corners to resize
Circle and rounded corners leave the corners transparent, so they always save as PNG. Circle locks the ratio to 1:1.
JPEG has no alpha channel. If the image has transparency, those areas are filled with this colour; the other formats keep it.
Exact selection (pixels)
Result
Your crop lands here with its dimensions and file size, ready to download.
How it works
Everything runs in your browser: the image is never uploaded, there is no account and no queue. Re-encoding the crop drops the original EXIF metadata, location included; if you only want to strip that data without cropping, use the EXIF viewer.
About this image cropper and circle-crop tool
Load an image and a crop box appears over it: drag the handles to frame exactly the part you want, or lock the selection to a preset ratio — 1:1 for an avatar, 4:5 for Instagram, 16:9 for a banner — and the live preview updates as you go. Switch the mask to a circle or an ellipse and the tool cuts a clean round crop instead of a rectangle. Everything is drawn on a canvas inside this tab, so no image is uploaded, there is no file-size cap and no account, and you can crop one photo or a whole batch at once.
The reason most people go looking for a circle crop is not the circle — it is the transparent background that has to come with it. A round profile picture placed on a coloured page needs its corners to disappear, and that only works if the file carries an alpha channel. JPEG has none: crop a circle to JPEG and the corners come back as a solid white (or black) square. So a circle crop here always exports as PNG, whose 32-bit mode stores real per-pixel transparency, and the corners are genuinely empty rather than painted over. WebP works too; JPEG never will.
This is also the step that desktop software makes weirdly hard. Word and PowerPoint both have Crop to Shape → Oval, and it looks like it worked — on the slide. But that shape is a display mask sitting on top of a still-rectangular picture; getting a real transparent PNG out of it means the desktop Office app plus Save as Picture and, on many versions, extra fiddling that still leaves a background behind. Photoshop does it properly and costs a subscription. That gap — everyone has a browser, the transparent PNG is two clicks — is exactly why the web tool exists, and why the search results for it are full of software tutorials rather than tools.
An honest note on quality. A crop redraws the chosen region through a canvas and re-encodes it, so a JPEG loses a small amount the way any re-save does; export as PNG (which the circle crop does anyway) and there is no generation loss at all. That re-encode also strips the metadata: the cropped copy you download carries no EXIF, so the GPS coordinates and camera details your phone wrote into the original are gone. If removing that data — without cropping — is the actual goal, the EXIF tool does it without touching a pixel.
A common use is an ID or passport photo, and here the tool helps with one half of the job and refuses to guess the other. It can hold a fixed aspect ratio and a square crop, which is the shape most ID photos want — the U.S. Department of State, for one, specifies a 2×2-inch photo at 600 to 1200 pixels on a plain background. But exact millimetres, head height and background rules differ by country and change over time, and a wrong size gets an application rejected, so this page does not hardcode them. Check your government’s current specification, then crop to it.
Transparency is a channel, not a colour: which formats can hold a circle crop
A circle crop is really a request for two things at once: keep the round region, and make everything outside it disappear. The first is geometry; the second is where file formats stop being interchangeable. A pixel that is “nothing” — see-through, so the page behind shows — cannot be described by a colour. It needs a fourth value alongside red, green and blue: the alpha channel, which records how opaque each pixel is, from fully solid to fully clear. A format without an alpha channel has no way to say “empty here”, so it fills the corners with an actual colour instead, and your circle arrives sitting on a square.
| Format | Transparency | As the output of a circle crop |
|---|---|---|
| PNG | Yes — 8-bit alpha, 256 levels of opacity per pixel | The safe default. Smooth, anti-aliased circle edge, works everywhere, corners genuinely clear. This page exports circle crops here. |
| WebP | Yes — full alpha in both lossy and lossless modes | Smaller than PNG for the same crop, same clean edge. Good when you control what opens the file; a few older programs still refuse .webp. |
| GIF | 1-bit only — a pixel is either fully solid or fully clear | Avoid for a circle. With no partial opacity the curved edge cannot be smoothed, so it comes out as a visible staircase. |
| JPEG | None at all | Cannot do it. The corners outside the circle become a solid fill — white unless set otherwise — because JPEG has no way to store an empty pixel. |
| SVG | Yes — vector, resolution-independent | Possible by wrapping the image in a circular clip path, but it embeds the whole rectangular photo and only shows the circle. Overkill for a one-off crop. |
The reason PNG and WebP look clean where GIF does not is that partial alpha. A circle drawn on a square grid never lands neatly on pixel boundaries, so the rim pixels are part inside, part outside. With 256 levels of opacity the encoder can make those rim pixels partly transparent and the curve reads as smooth; with GIF’s single on/off bit each rim pixel has to choose, and the eye reads the result as jagged. This is also why a circle crop should be exported at the size you will actually use rather than shrunk afterwards in a tool that flattens the alpha — resizing a transparent PNG in software that does not respect alpha is a classic way to get a grey or white fringe around the circle.
Why Word, PowerPoint and Photoshop send people to the browser
There is a whole genre of tutorial titled “how to crop a picture into a circle”, and almost all of it is about desktop apps rather than web tools. That is a clue, not a coincidence. The apps everyone already has can display a circular crop, but turning that display into a transparent PNG file is where each of them adds friction — a paid tier, a hidden export step, or a mask that was never a real cut in the first place.
| Tool | What it does with a circle crop | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Word / PowerPoint | Crop to Shape → Oval masks the picture to an oval on the page | It is a display mask, not a cut. Getting a transparent PNG out means the desktop Office app plus Save as Picture, and on many versions the saved file still carries a background. |
| Photoshop | Does it properly — elliptical marquee, layer mask, export a clean transparent PNG | It is a paid subscription for a job most people need once. |
| Canva | Circle frames crop an image cleanly on the canvas | A transparent-background PNG download is a Canva Pro feature; the free export flattens onto a background. |
| This page | Canvas clip path cuts the circle and exports PNG with a real alpha channel | None of the above — no install, no account, no paid tier, and the image never leaves your tab. |
- Load your image — drop it on the page or pick it from the file dialog. Nothing uploads; it is read straight into a canvas.
- Switch the mask to circle (or ellipse for a non-square crop), and if you want a perfect circle set the aspect ratio to 1:1 first.
- Drag and resize the round selection until it frames the face or subject; the preview shows exactly what the exported file will contain.
- Export as PNG. The circle crop stays PNG on purpose, because that is the format that keeps the corners transparent.
- Verify it: drop the downloaded PNG onto a coloured background — a slide, a page, a profile field. If the corners show the background and not a white square, the alpha is intact.
ID and passport photos: what a cropper can and cannot decide for you
A cropper is a useful part of making a document photo, and a dangerous whole. It controls shape and pixels; it does not know your country’s rules, and those rules are what actually get a photo accepted or rejected. The honest split is worth laying out plainly, because the failure mode here is not a bad-looking image — it is a rejected application weeks later.
| What matters for an ID photo | Can a cropper set it? | Where the real number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Aspect ratio and square shape | Yes — lock the ratio and cut a square or the required rectangle | The cropper handles this directly |
| Output pixel dimensions | Yes — crop to, or export at, a target pixel size | You supply the number from your country’s spec |
| Physical size in mm or inches | Only indirectly — pixels at a stated DPI map to a physical size, but you must do the arithmetic against the official figure | Your national passport authority |
| Head height and position in the frame | No — this is a composition and measurement rule the tool cannot enforce | Your national passport authority |
| Background colour and lighting | No — the tool crops, it does not recolour or relight | Your national passport authority |
One concrete, verifiable anchor so this is not all abstraction: the U.S. Department of State specifies a passport photo of 2×2 inches, 600 to 1200 pixels square, in colour, on a plain white or off-white background, taken within the last six months. That is the United States, today. It is not the rule in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Spain or anywhere else — sizes, head proportions and background colours all differ, and several countries publish their specs in millimetres rather than inches. So treat any single number, including that one, as an example of the shape of the requirement, not the requirement itself. Find your own authority’s current page, read the size and background rules there, and crop to those — a photo that is a few millimetres off is a common, avoidable reason for a rejected application.
Reference tables
FAQ
How do I crop an image into a circle with a transparent background?
Load the photo, switch the mask from rectangle to circle, drag the round selection over the part you want, and export. The key detail is the export format: transparency needs an alpha channel, and only PNG and WebP have one, so this page saves a circle crop as PNG automatically. If you force it to JPEG instead, the corners outside the circle fill with a solid colour — white by default — because JPEG cannot store “nothing” in a pixel. Once you have the PNG, drop it onto any coloured background and the corners stay clear, which is the whole point of the round crop.
Does cropping reduce the image quality?
A crop only keeps the pixels inside your selection and discards the rest — it does not scale anything, so there is no blur or stretching. The one subtlety is the file format. Redrawing the region through a canvas re-encodes it, and re-encoding a JPEG is very slightly lossy, the same tiny cost as any re-save. Export the crop as PNG (which the circle mask does anyway) and it is pixel-exact with no generation loss. If you plan to crop the same file several times, keep the original and crop a copy each time, because JPEG losses stack with every save.
Can I crop a photo to passport or ID size here?
Partly, and it is worth being precise about which part. The tool can lock a fixed aspect ratio and cut a square, which is the shape most document photos use, and you can then set a target pixel size. What it deliberately does not do is invent the official numbers, because those are set per country and getting them wrong gets an application rejected. As one verifiable example, the U.S. Department of State requires a 2×2-inch photo, 600 to 1200 pixels, on a plain light background. Every other country differs on size, head height and background, so look up your own authority’s current rule and crop to that rather than trusting a blog.