How to set a full photo as your WhatsApp profile picture without cropping

Choose a tall photo as your WhatsApp profile picture and the app makes you crop it to a square, cutting off heads, feet or half the group. Then it shows the square as a small circle, cutting the corners too. To keep the whole photo, you have to make it square yourself, by adding space around it rather than removing parts of it.

Why WhatsApp crops

Profile pictures on WhatsApp, as on most apps, are stored as squares and displayed as circles in chat lists. A portrait or landscape photo does not fit a square, so something has to give: either the app crops it, or you pad it with a background so that the whole picture fits.

Pad the photo step by step

1. Open the Instagram Image Resizer. Its square format, 1080 × 1080 pixels, works for any app that wants a square.
2. Choose Square post and the framing option Fit and pad.
3. Pick a padding colour: white, black, or a colour taken from the photo so the border looks intentional.
4. Download the square image and set it as your profile photo. WhatsApp no longer needs to crop.

The image is processed in your browser, so the photo is not uploaded anywhere along the way.

Remember the circle

Even a perfect square is shown as a circle in chat lists. The corners of the square are hidden, and in a padded image the photo sits in the middle, so it is mostly safe. But a very tall photo becomes a narrow strip in the middle of the circle, and a wide group photo becomes a thin band. At the size of a chat list icon, faces in that band are tiny.

For a group photo, a better result is often to crop a little and pad a little: use Crop Image to trim empty sky or floor first, then pad what is left.

Want the circle exactly?

Circle Crop Image lets you position and zoom the photo inside a circle and see precisely what will show. The result has transparent corners. WhatsApp will fill them with its own background, which is fine, and you will know in advance that no one's head is cut off.

Tips for a profile picture people recognise

• Faces large. In a chat list the circle is roughly the size of a fingertip. A face that fills half the frame is recognisable; a full-length photo is not.
• Plain background. Busy backgrounds turn to noise when shrunk.
• Good light. A dim indoor photo gets darker and grainier after the app compresses it.

The same trick elsewhere

Telegram, Signal, Instagram and many work chat apps also show square-cropped circles, so the same padded image works there. For a profile picture that is round by design, with a ring around it, see how to make a round profile picture. If you want the whole photo on an Instagram post with white borders, see adding white borders for Instagram.