The upload says square, the site shows a circle, and your face is cut in half

The quick answer: first find out what the site does with your picture

You upload a profile picture, the form says square, and the site shows it in a circle with your forehead gone and your chin in the corner. Before you crop, decide whether the site cuts its own circle. Many do, and for those you upload a square, not a circle. Crop it in the image cropper and keep the face inside the middle of the box.

1. Open the cropper and choose your photo, drop it on the page or paste it.
2. Pick the shape: Rectangle with the 1:1 ratio for a square upload, Circle for a circle file.
3. Drag the box until the face sits a little above its center. Use a corner to make the box larger or smaller.
4. Read the size in pixels above the button and compare it with the site's minimum.
5. Press Crop image, check the preview, which is the real file, and download it.

The photo is cropped in your browser tab and never uploaded.

What a circle crop file really is

Pictures are rectangles, and a circle crop does not change that. It keeps a square part of your photo and makes everything outside the circle inside that square transparent. The file is still a square, and you only see the circle.

The corners are about a fifth of it. An 800 by 800 pixel file holds 640,000 pixels, of which about 502,655 are inside the circle and 137,345 are see-through. That is 21.5 percent, which is one minus a quarter of pi.

Where the file ends up matters. A site that converts uploads to JPG fills the corners with a solid color, often white or black. If that is not what you want, upload the square version instead.

Keep the face in the frame

The circle touches all four sides of its box, so its radius is half the side. A point is inside only if it lies within 50 percent of the side from the center, and the corner of a square is about 71 percent away (the square root of 2, halved). That is why a head in the top corner of a square vanishes, and why a circle takes more off the top of a portrait than a square does.

• Leave room above the head. A face sits well a little above the center of the circle, with the eyes near the upper third.
• Do the same for a square you will upload. Sites often cut their circle from the middle.

Resolution before and after

A crop is not scaled. The box is converted to the pixels of the original and copied out of the full resolution picture, so a 1,200 pixel box gives a 1,200 by 1,200 file. A 4032 by 3024 phone photo has 12,192,768 pixels, and a 1,200 pixel square around a face has 1,440,000. That is 11.8 percent of them, and plenty for an avatar shown a few hundred pixels wide.

If a site wants an exact size such as 400 by 400, crop first and resize second: crop a 1:1 box, then set 400 by 400 in Resize Image. A crop smaller than the target is not enlarged unless you turn on Allow enlarging, and enlarging only makes it soft. The one thing you cannot fix later is starting too small, so use the biggest box that still frames the face well.

Crop to an exact size or a ratio

The four number fields show the box in pixels of the full picture: X and Y are the distance from the left and top edges, width and height are its size. Typing a number moves the box at once, and a number that does not fit is marked and not applied. The box cannot be bigger than the picture.

Cropping cuts away part of the picture, while resizing changes the pixel size and keeps everything. To give a whole folder the same square shape, Resize Image has a Fill and crop option with a choice of which part stays. The cropper takes one picture at a time, because you place the box by eye.

Cutting the box out changes no pixel of an opaque picture, and saving as PNG keeps them exactly. A JPG, WebP or AVIF crop is compressed once more, which at the default JPG quality of 90 is hard to see but not zero. For a 16:9 crop, see the YouTube thumbnail size guide.

Staying under a file size

Profile forms often set a limit in KB. Run the crop through the image compressor and switch on Stay under a file size. In the tests behind reduce a photo to 200 KB or less, two ordinary photos came out at about 735 to 785 pixels on their longest side for 50 KB and about 1,070 to 1,150 for 100 KB, which is more than most avatars need.

A circle with transparent corners is a PNG, WebP or AVIF, and a photo saved as PNG is several times larger than the same photo as a JPG. If the circle is too heavy, try WebP where it is accepted. If the form only takes JPG, you cannot send transparency, so upload the square. JPG vs PNG vs WebP vs AVIF explains why.

Passport and ID photos: follow the issuing authority

Passport, visa and ID photos have rules set by the authority that issues them. Stop as soon as the file fits them. They can cover pixel size, proportions, background, face position, file type and file size, and they differ by country and change over time, so this guide does not list them. Read the authority's own instructions. The cropper gives exact pixels and shape, and the compressor the file size, but the numbers must come from the authority.

What goes wrong, and the fix

• The top of the head is cut off. The circle takes the top corners. Move the box up or use a larger one.
• The corners are white or black on the site. It converted your transparent file to JPG. Upload the square.
• A colored rim shows around the circle. The site cut its own circle from yours. Upload a square.
• The avatar looks soft. Too few pixels for the size shown. Crop a bigger box or start from a larger photo.

The cropped file carries no camera details, date or GPS location unless you choose Keep. Leaving them out is the safer choice for a public profile. Remove location data from photos explains what a photo can give away, and if you want your name on it, add a watermark to photos in bulk.