Profile Picture Maker

Almost every platform displays a profile picture as a circle, and almost every tool for making one shows you a square. The corners are exactly the part that disappears, so previewing a square is previewing the wrong thing — which is why so many profile pictures end up with the top of someone's head cut off.

This shows three previews at once: the circle it will become, the square file itself, and the small circle it appears at next to a comment. That last one is the honest test. A profile picture is seen at about forty pixels far more often than at four hundred, and a photo that works full size can be an unreadable smudge at the size it is usually viewed.

Zoom and position let you frame the face where you want it rather than accepting a centre crop. The output is square, because that is what every platform asks for and what they all crop from.

Where the photo does not fill the square — a portrait framed tall, for instance — you choose the background rather than getting black or transparency by default. There is also a PNG option that cuts the picture to an actual circle, for the few places that do not crop one themselves.

Everything happens on your device. A profile picture is a photograph of a person's face, so it never leaving your browser is not a footnote.