Avatar frame
Crop a photo to a circle and add a coloured frame, in your browser. Exports a transparent PNG at up to 1024 px.
Runs in your browser
Pick a photo. It is cropped and framed on your device.
Frames are drawn from a handful of colour values rather than loaded as artwork, so there is nothing here you cannot publish.
Frames are drawn, not downloaded
Every frame here is produced from a handful of colour values and a line width — there is no artwork behind any of them.
That is a deliberate choice, and the reason is the point of the tool. An avatar exists to be published: it goes on a profile, in a group chat, on a forum. A frame taken from somebody else’s illustration is a licensing mistake that becomes public the moment you use it. A ring described by three colour stops cannot be.
It also means the frames are sharp at every size. There is no asset to be upscaled, so a 1024 px export is drawn at 1024 px rather than blown up from a 512 px image.
Sizes
512 px is the default and the right answer for almost everyone. It is larger than every avatar slot in common use, so the platform downscales it with its own resampling rather than you baking a loss in beforehand.
Go to 1024 px if the image will also be used somewhere larger. Drop to 256 px only if something has an explicit upload limit — the file is a little smaller, and the ring gets slightly less room to be smooth.
Transparency, and when to turn it off
The export is a PNG with an alpha channel, so the corners outside the circle are genuinely transparent. On a platform that displays avatars as circles this makes no difference. On one that displays them as squares, the transparent corners take the colour of whatever is behind them, which is usually what you want.
Turn transparency off and pick a background colour when you need the corners to be a specific colour rather than whatever the platform decides — printed name badges and slide decks being the common cases.
Cropping and zoom
The photo is cropped to its largest centred square, then to a circle or a rounded square. Zoom tightens that crop towards the centre rather than scaling the photo up, so the frame is always filled and never leaves a transparent wedge at the edge.
Because the crop is centred, a subject who is off to one side will be cut. Crop the photo first if the composition matters.
Rounded square
Some platforms show avatars as a rounded square rather than a circle. The rounded-square option matches that, using a corner radius in the same proportion those platforms use, so the frame follows the shape rather than sitting outside it.
Your photo stays here
The photo is decoded, cropped and framed inside this page. Nothing is uploaded.