Make a round avatar image

The job

Profile pictures, app icons, and speaker headshots are usually displayed inside a circle. Making the image itself round — with real transparency — means it sits cleanly on any background instead of relying on the site to clip it.

Circle vs rounded corners

Circle mode first crops to a centered square, then rounds fully — the subject should already be near the middle, or it gets clipped. Rounded-corner mode keeps the full image and just softens the edges, which suits screenshots and product photos.

If the face or logo is off-center, crop it square with the image cropper first, then round it.

Why PNG

Corners outside the radius are transparent, and only PNG (and WebP) keep transparency — JPEG would fill them with white. The file is still a rectangle at the byte level; the “round” is an alpha mask, so check the rendered result, not the file icon.