Circle Crop Image
Processing entirely on your device — large files may take a moment.
Avatars, badges, team pages and print buttons all want circular images. This tool takes the largest centered square from your photo, clips it to a perfect circle and outputs PNG with fully transparent corners — drop it on any background with no white squares.
The crop is centered — the composition most avatars need. For off-center framing, crop wider first and circle-crop the result.
How to circle crop
- 1
Select your files
Drag & drop your JPG files onto the area above, or click to browse. You can add multiple files at once for batch conversion.
- 2
Convert instantly
Click "Convert to PNG". The conversion runs entirely inside your browser using WebAssembly — no upload, no queue, no waiting.
- 3
Download results
Download each converted PNG file individually, or grab everything at once as a ZIP archive.
About the JPG format
JPG (short for JPEG, the Joint Photographic Experts Group committee that standardized it in 1992) has been the default photo format for over three decades. It compresses photographs using the discrete cosine transform: the image is split into 8×8 blocks, and details the human eye is bad at noticing are discarded. The result is files many times smaller than uncompressed data, at a quality level you control when saving.
In practice JPG is unbeatable for photographs and smooth gradients — camera memory cards, messaging apps and the web all assume it. It is a poor fit for screenshots, logos or anything with sharp edges and flat color, where compression leaves visible ringing around text. There is no transparency support, color depth is capped at 8 bits per channel, and every re-save with compression compounds tiny generational losses.
+Strengths
- ✓Opens on literally every device, app and browser made in the last 30 years
- ✓Compresses photos dramatically — typically 10:1 or better with little visible loss
- ✓Quality level is adjustable, so you can trade fidelity for file size
- ✓Mature ecosystem: EXIF metadata, ICC profiles and progressive loading all supported
!Limitations
- −Lossy — artifacts appear on text, sharp edges and flat areas
- −No transparency, so overlays and logos need PNG or WebP instead
- −Repeated re-saving at low quality permanently degrades the image
About the PNG format
PNG was created in 1996 as a free, open replacement for the patent-encumbered GIF, and it has been the reference lossless image format ever since. Pixels are compressed with the DEFLATE algorithm (the same one inside ZIP files), which reproduces the original image exactly — bit-for-bit — while supporting full 8-bit or 16-bit alpha transparency. Screenshots, logos, icons, charts and anything with text or sharp edges should live in PNG.
Because it never discards information, PNG files of photographs are several times larger than JPG — that is the price of perfection. Modern PNG encoders add filters per scanline that make screenshots and flat-color graphics compress surprisingly well. PNG also became the base of APNG, the animation extension that browsers play natively.
+Strengths
- ✓Truly lossless — every pixel survives exactly as it was
- ✓Full alpha transparency with smooth edges, not 1-bit masks
- ✓Open standard, unpatented, with excellent tooling everywhere
- ✓Ideal for text, line art and flat-color graphics — sharp edges stay sharp
!Limitations
- −Photographs become several times larger than JPG
- −Base format has no animation (that is the APNG extension)
- −16-bit or high-resolution PNGs can grow very heavy
Frequently asked questions
Why is the output PNG?
The corners must be transparent, and JPG has no alpha channel — a circular JPG would carry white squares into every background.
Can I control which part stays in the circle?
The circle takes the centered square. To shift the framing, crop the region first with the crop tool and circle-crop that output.
Will the circle be a perfect circle even for rectangular photos?
Yes — the crop side is the shorter dimension, so the output is always a perfect square with a perfect inscribed circle.