How to Crop a Circle in GIMP

Cropping into a circle is useful for profile pictures, thumbnails, avatar images, and any design where you want a round cutout. GIMP does not have a one-click circle crop button, but it takes about six steps and you will have a perfect round image ready to export.

Before You Start

A circle crop works best when your starting image is already square - Or close to it. If the image is a landscape rectangle, the circle will fit inside the short side, cutting off the left and right. To get a clean circle of the specific area you want, crop the image to a square first.

To crop to a square: select the Rectangle Select tool, check Fixed Aspect Ratio in Tool Options and set it to 1:1, then drag your selection and go to Image - Crop to Selection.

Cropping Into a Circle

1. 1
   Add an alpha channel - Go to Layer - Transparency - Add Alpha Channel. Without this, the area outside the circle fills with white instead of being transparent.
2. 2
   Select the Ellipse Select tool - Press E or click the oval icon in the Toolbox.
3. 3
   Draw a perfect circle - Hold Shift while dragging to constrain the ellipse to a perfect circle. Drag from one corner to the opposite corner to fill the image.
4. 4
   Invert the selection - Go to Select - Invert (or press Ctrl+I). Now the area outside the circle is selected.
5. 5
   Delete the outside area - Press Delete. The corners disappear and you see a grey checkerboard - That is transparency.
6. 6
   Deselect - Press Shift+Ctrl+A to clear the selection.
7. 7
   Crop to the circle - Go to Image - Crop to Content to trim the transparent edges and get a tight bounding box around your circle.

Exporting the Circle Image

Save as PNG to keep the transparent corners. Go to File - Export As, name the file with a .png extension, and click Export.

Tips for a Cleaner Result

The same technique works for oval shapes too - Just skip the Shift key when dragging the Ellipse Select, and you get any ellipse shape you want.

For more cropping techniques including cropping individual layers without affecting the rest of the image, the full crop and resize guide covers every scenario.