Profile Picture Cropper
Drag the photo behind the window and zoom until the part you want is inside it. The previews below are the finished files, masked into the shape each surface actually uses, so you find out here rather than after uploading that the circle takes the top of your head off. Save one size, or all of them as a zip.
Drop a photo to crop
One file at a time, up to 50.0 MB. It is decoded, cropped and re-encoded in this tab and never uploaded.
Nothing loaded yet. Drop a photo above — it is cropped inside this browser tab and never uploaded.
Build the rest of the profile too
The avatar is one square. Moda is where the banner, the posts and the deck get made.
Try Moda free →Everything is square, and almost nothing is shown square
Every platform stores an avatar as a square image and then masks it at display time. X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Discord and GitHub all mask a personal avatar to a circle; Slack uses a rounded square. Either way the corners of what you upload are invisible, and the circle inscribed in a square drops about 21 percent of its area. A crop that looks balanced as a square routinely loses the top of a head, the shoulders, or half of a logo once the mask lands. The window here is square because that is what gets uploaded, and the previews are masked because that is what gets seen.
Why zoom and drag instead of drag handles
A general-purpose cropper gives you eight handles and a free rectangle, which is the right tool when the output shape is up to you. Here it never is: the result is a square, so the only real decisions are how much of the photo to include and which part. Two gestures cover both, and they cannot produce an invalid crop — the image can never be dragged far enough to leave a gap, and the zoom stops at the point where the window is exactly filled. If you need a non-square crop or a specific aspect ratio, the general image cropper is the page for that.
Upload big, even for a small avatar
The sizes offered here are upload sizes, not display sizes, and the gap is large. X renders an avatar at 48 pixels in a timeline and still wants a 400-pixel file, because it re-renders the same source at a dozen sizes and at double density on retina screens. TikTok asks for only 200, YouTube for 800. Uploading at the display size is the single most common reason an avatar looks soft next to everyone else's. The page warns you when a size is larger than the region you cropped, because at that point the file is being enlarged rather than sharpened and no amount of re-saving will fix it — the pixels were never there.
PNG or JPG, and what happens to transparency
For a photograph, JPG is smaller with no visible difference. For anything with flat colour — a logo, an illustration, a wordmark — PNG stays crisp where JPG smears the edges. Transparency is the one real trap: the circle you see in the preview is a mask the platform draws, not a hole in your file, so a PNG with a transparent background is uploaded with transparent corners and then composited onto whatever the platform puts behind it, which is white in light mode and near-black in dark mode. If your subject has a light outline, that flips from invisible to obvious depending on the viewer's theme. Choosing JPG here flattens onto a colour you pick, which removes the question entirely.
Frequently asked questions
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is decoded into the page, cropped against that decoded bitmap, and re-encoded by your own browser, and nothing is ever sent to a server — which is worth knowing for a photograph of your own face. Two pieces of code are fetched on demand rather than up front: the zip writer, when you ask for the whole set at once, and a decoder for iPhone HEIC photos when you drop one. Both are code arriving at your browser, not your photograph leaving it.
What size should my profile picture be?
Square, at least 400 pixels on a side, and larger if the platform asks — YouTube wants 800. If you only want one file that works everywhere, export the largest size offered here and upload that: every platform downsizes, none of them upsizes, so a file bigger than needed loses nothing while a file smaller than needed cannot be recovered.
Why does my avatar look different on each platform?
Three reasons, all visible above. The mask shape differs — Slack uses a rounded square where everyone else uses a circle. The display size differs by an order of magnitude, and a face that reads at 400 pixels can be an unrecognizable smudge at 32. And each platform re-compresses what you upload with its own settings, which is another reason to give it more resolution than it displays.
Can I make the background transparent or remove it?
Not on this page — it crops and resizes, it does not cut subjects out. If the photo already has a transparent background, saving as PNG keeps it. If you need to remove a background first, do that before cropping, then bring the result here to frame it.
How much of the square does the circle actually cut?
The inscribed circle keeps about 79 percent of the square's area, and the part it removes is entirely at the corners. In practice that means anything you want kept should sit inside the middle of the frame, and the corners are only ever safe for background. It is also why a wide crop of a group photo makes a bad avatar: the faces at the edges are the first thing the mask takes.