How to Crop a Photo to a Perfect Square

Almost every profile photo field — LinkedIn, Slack, GitHub, WhatsApp, app store listings — expects a square image, but almost no photo comes out of a camera as a square. The result is usually an automatic crop that lops off part of a head or shifts the subject off-center.

Center the subject before you crop

A square crop only looks right if the important part of the photo — usually a face — sits roughly in the middle, with a little breathing room on every side. If the subject is off to one side in the original photo, note roughly where you want the final square to sit before you start dragging the crop box.

Lock the aspect ratio to 1:1

Our Crop Image tool lets you set a fixed 1:1 aspect ratio, so the crop box always stays a perfect square as you resize and reposition it — no eyeballing, no accidentally ending up with a slightly-off rectangle that looks wrong once it's inside a circular avatar frame.

Watch out for circular crops

Many platforms take your square upload and mask it into a circle for the display avatar. That means the corners of your square get cut off too — leave a bit of extra margin around the subject rather than cropping right up to the edges, or the circular version can end up cutting into hair or shoulders.

After cropping

If the cropped square is much larger than the platform actually needs, resize it down with Resize Image — most avatar uploads only need to be a few hundred pixels wide — and compress it with Compress Image if there's a file size limit on the upload form.