Sometimes, you spot a poster that has a circle photo in it. If you use Photoshop or GIMP, the first step you need to do to add a circle photo (or other image types in general) to the design you are working on is to crop the photo/image. This article will show you how to crop an image into a circle shape in GIMP.

GIMP itself has a crop tool that you can use effortlessly crop an image. However, you can only use this tool to crop an image into either square or rectangle. It takes a little trick to crop an image into a circle shape in GIMP.

First off, launch GIMP and open the image you want to crop. Once the image is open, add Alpha Channel to make the background of the image be transparent once you delete the unselected area later. To do so, go to Layer -> Transparency -> Add Alpha Channel.

Activate the Ellipse Select Tool by clicking its icon on the Toolbox (shortcut: E).

Go to the Tool Options section (beneath the Toolbox) and make sure the Fixed option is selected and set it to Aspect ratio. Also make sure the aspect ratio is 1:1.

Now select the area of the image you want to crop. Hit the enter key on the keyboard to apply the selection. Take a look at the screencast below.

Once the selection is applied, go to Select -> Invert (shortcut: Ctrl+I).

Press the delete key on the keyboard. If everything went well, you should see the following result.

Now you can use the crop tool of GIMP to remove the unused parts of the image. Once you are done, you can copy the cropped image to the design you are creating on another tab on GIMP. Or, you might want to export it if you want to use the cropped image on another tool. Make sure you export your image in the PNG format to get a transparent background since JPG doesn’t support transparency.