The form chopped your head. Decide the frame before you resize

You drop a portrait into a signup form and the preview chops the top of the head. Or you post an avatar and a landscape phone shot gets squashed into a rectangle. The usual reflex is to change the pixel size. That rarely puts the hairline back.

Decide the frame first: lock 1:1 or a 1-inch / 3:4 box, then move it until the head is whole. Pixels come after — and only if the site names them.

Crop first, or change the size first?

Crop decides what stays in the picture. Resize only changes how many pixels that picture has. Match the job before you touch a slider:

• The form or avatar window cut the hair, ear, or chin — crop. Lock 1:1 for a square profile, or a 1-inch / 3:4 (or 5:7) box for a resume / ID look. Do not stretch a wide shot into a square.
• The face is already centered and the ratio looks right, but the page names exact pixels (295×413, 200×200) — skip another crop; open Resize.
• You have a stack of portraits that already share a frame and only need the same width and height — crop is the wrong tool for the last step. Resize can batch; crop cannot.
• You are still holding an iPhone .heic and the crop page will not open it — convert first with the HEIC to JPG walkthrough, then crop the JPG.

Lock the box, then move it

Open Crop and treat it as a single-image job:

1. Drop only this photo — JPG, PNG, WebP, or GIF, about 20MB. More files means repeating the whole path. Do not look for a batch toggle.
2. Lock the ratio before you drag. Avatar: 1:1. One-inch / ID look: 3:4 or a custom 25:35 / 5:7. Free crop is for keeping a specific edge, not for a form that will re-crop you later.
3. Move the whole box until the eyes sit in the upper third and a little space sits above the hair. Nudge the corners only after the head is fully inside. Leave the ears in.
4. Read the preview, then download this one file. The live pixel readout is a preview, not the form’s final size. Need another portrait? Start a new crop.

Open Crop →

The frame is right — what still blocks the upload?

• The page still names a width and height — run the cropped file through Resize. Same pixels on many files: that is the step you batch.
• The background is a bedroom wall and the form wants white or blue — use Cutout & Background after the face is framed.
• The portal also caps KB — follow the target-KB walkthrough. Crop first; do not compress a badly framed original.
• The system wants one PDF, not a folder of portraits — stack pages with the merge guide.
• A chat or ID scan in the same pack still shows a phone number — redact the screenshot before you attach it.

Wrap-up

Hairline chopped or the avatar looks like a squeezed rectangle: lock 1:1 or a 1-inch / 3:4 frame, move the box until the head is whole, then resize only if the site names pixels. Crop one photo at a time. Unify size with a batch resize. Convert HEIC first. Keep the original on this device.