Profile Picture Cropper
Crop a circular profile picture for LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and GitHub.
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
How does the cropper fit a photo into the frame?
At zoom 1.00 the photo is scaled until its shorter side exactly fills the square, and the longer side overflows equally at both ends. Zoom runs from 0.50 to 3.00 in steps of 0.05. The Horizontal and Vertical sliders move the photo up to 400 pixels either way, counted in output pixels, so a shift of 100 is a quarter of a 400-pixel LinkedIn frame but less than a tenth of the 1080 Square.
Take a 3000×2000 landscape photo and the LinkedIn (400×400) preset. At zoom 1.00 it is drawn at 600×400: the frame shows the middle 2000×2000 of the original, with 100 pixels of slack to the left and right and none above or below. Any Vertical offset at this zoom uncovers a strip of background color. At zoom 1.50 the photo is drawn at 900×600, which allows 250 pixels of horizontal movement and 100 vertical, and the frame now covers a square about 1,333 pixels wide in the original.
Why does the saved circle have colored corners?
With Circle crop on, the photo is clipped to a circle after the whole canvas has been painted with the background color. The corners outside the circle keep that color, white by default, and the downloaded file is still a square PNG in which those corners make up about 21.5 percent of the area. On screen the preview rounds them off, so you only notice them when the file opens somewhere else. Set the background to the color of the slide or web page where the round picture will sit and the corners blend in.
Sites that display avatars in a circle mask the corners themselves, so a square upload works there. The same color fills any gap inside the frame: at zoom 0.50 the 3000×2000 example shrinks to 300×200 and leaves 50-pixel bands at the sides and 100-pixel bands at the top and bottom.
Which preset size should you download?
The presets are Instagram at 320×320, LinkedIn and Twitter / X at 400×400, Facebook at 180×180, WhatsApp at 640×640, GitHub at 460×460, YouTube at 800×800 and Square at 1080×1080. Your choice is recorded in the file name, for example profile-400px-circle.png. Larger presets only help when the photo has enough pixels. A 500×500 headshot saved as Square is enlarged 2.16 times at zoom 1.00 and 3.24 times at zoom 1.50, and it will look soft, so choose the biggest preset your photo can fill without enlarging.
Pick another photo swaps the image and keeps your zoom, offsets, size and background, which helps when you prepare several team photos in one sitting. Everything is drawn on a canvas in your browser, and the photo is not uploaded. For passport, visa or Aadhaar photos measured in millimetres, use the Passport Photo Maker.