Have you ever seen websites and wondered: “How to they crop a picture into a circle?”  As you learn to build a website yourself you will notice how the process  really gets your creative juices flowing? This happens to me all the time. When I add content to my websites or teach my students how to improve their websites, I always end up having fun not only creating the pages or blog posts, but also in creating the graphics for my website!

And one of the questions I often get from my Graphics Creation Workshop students is, “How do I crop a picture into a circle shape or circle image?”

A “circle image” looks something like this:

Little Red Riding Hood - Rectangular Image
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Little Red Riding Hood - Circular Image
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Many people think you need to have a professional (and often expensive) image editor like Photoshop to crop pictures into circles. Fortunately, that’s not the case. There are multiple ways to customize your images without expensive software! 

Two of the tools I like are PicMonkey.com and iPiccy.com. I’ve used PicMonkey for years, and it was free for a long time. Now you need a premium account to save and/or export any graphics you make. PicMonkey is still a great tool that I recommend.

However, I wanted to find a free tool. So, let me introduce you to www.iPiccy.com. iPiccy is an amazing free site that allows you to edit photos and create designs and collages. In just a couple of minutes, you can crop a rectangular image into a circle shape.  

Here is a short (4 min) video on how to Crop a Picture Into a Circle:

If you’d prefer to follow written steps, rather than a video, here are my simple steps to cropping a picture into a circle with iPiccy.  

Steps to Crop a Picture with iPiccy:

Step 1: Go to https://iPiccy.com. Click on the “Edit a Photo” button

How to Crop a Picture Into a Circle - step 1
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Step 2: Click on the “Open” button to upload a picture from your computer, or select one of their images.

How to Crop a Picture Into a Circle - step 2
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Step 3: If your image is not square, first crop it to a square shape by selecting the “Crop Picture” and then select the drop-down for “Square”. Click Apply.

How to Crop a Picture Into a Circle - step 3
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Step 4: Select the “Frames” icon on the left-hand side. Then select “Rounded Corners”, and drag the Radius slider all the way to the right to get a perfect circle:

Close-Up of Frames Icon
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How to Crop a Picture Into a Circle - step 4
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Step 5: Go back up to the top and save your cropped picture to your computer:

How to Crop a Picture Into a Circle - step 5
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As you saw during Step 4, you can use this technique to create rounded corner images, as well as cropped circle images. And if you don’t have good professional pictures, read my article on getting free stock photography.

Circular images work really well for your author box, bio page, sales page, and more. I often see them used to feature guests/experts on event websites. So, have fun coming up with creative uses for this technique and crop more pictures into circles!

So if you’re interested in learning how to create and edit more images like the example above, check out my Graphics Creation Workshop Program.

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(This article was originally published in October 2017)