WhatsApp DP Size Maker

You set a group photo as your WhatsApp DP and the people at the ends disappeared, or someone's head was clipped in the chat list. Two separate crops cause that, and both can be worked out in advance. This page gives the arithmetic for each, and the photo size at which nothing is hidden.

Two crops, not one

WhatsApp's help page describes the first step: you move and resize a circle over the photo to crop it. A circle inside a photo can be no wider than the photo's short side, so everything outside the square around that circle is lost, and a photo that is not square cannot fill that square without losing something. The largest square in a 4:3 landscape photo is three-quarters of its width, so a quarter of the photo goes straight away.

The second crop happens in chats. WhatsApp shows the square as a circle, and the circle hides its four corners.

The tool removes the first crop by making it unnecessary. It draws the whole photo, uncropped and centred, inside a square, and fills the empty bands with a blurred copy of the photo or a plain colour. The photo size slider deals with the second.

WhatsApp publishes no DP size

Searches turn up three different figures, and only one of them comes from Meta.

The only official figure described a retired business product, not the ordinary app. For the everyday app there is no official DP size, so the tool's 500, 640 and 1080 squares are common sizes, not a specification. That same retired document said uploaded photos were scaled and cropped to a square.

How much of the photo each crop costs

A circle inside a square covers π ÷ 4 of it, about 78.54%. A photo filling the whole square therefore loses 1 − π ÷ 4 of its area, 21.46%, all at the corners. A photo of another shape, fitted whole at 100%, touches only two sides of the square, so less of it reaches the corners.

Computed with the tool's own functions and checked against the exact geometry:

The first column takes the largest square the photo allows, then the circle; a smaller crop circle loses more, hence "at least". For 4:3 that is a quarter lost to the square, then 21.46% of the remaining three-quarters, about 16.1% of the photo, lost to the circle. A wider photo loses more to the square crop and less to the circle, which is why fitting it whole matters most for group shots.

The formula for fitting inside the circle

A rectangle fits inside a circle when its diagonal is no longer than the diameter, and in a DP the diameter is the side of the square. Call that side 1 and the photo's long side L. With r = short side ÷ long side, the diagonal is L × √(1 + r²). Setting it equal to 1 gives:

safe size = 1 ÷ √(1 + r²)

For a square photo, r = 1 and the safe size is 1 ÷ √2, or 70.71%. For 4:3, r = 0.75, so 1 + r² = 1.5625, whose square root is 1.25: exactly 80%. For 16:9, r = 0.5625 and the result is 87.16%.

The "Fit inside the circle" button rounds this down to a whole percent, 70% rather than 70.71%, so the corners sit just inside the circle. Above the safe size the hidden share climbs fast: a 4:3 photo loses 0.77% at 85%, 2.86% at 90% and 10.39% at 100%. For your own photo, the tool adds up thin vertical strips to measure the share hidden at the size you pick, and shows it to the nearest whole percent.

A worked example at 640 × 640

Take a 4:3 phone photo, 4032 × 3024 pixels, and the default 640 × 640 output.

At 100% the photo is 640 × 480, with a band of (640 − 480) ÷ 2 = 80 pixels above and below for the background. In chats the circle clips its corners and hides 10.39%, which the tool shows as 10%.

At 80%, the safe size, the photo is 512 × 384. Its diagonal is √(512² + 384²) = 640 pixels, exactly the circle's diameter, so the corners touch the circle and nothing is lost. A square photo at 70% is 448 × 448, with a diagonal of about 633.6 pixels, just inside.

The slider changes only how much background surrounds the photo; the photo itself is never cropped.

Filling the empty space: blurred or plain

The bands can be a blurred copy of the photo (the default), white, black or a colour you choose.

The blurred version is the photo itself, enlarged to cover the square and heavily blurred, so its colours match the picture in front. It does not use the browser's canvas blur filter, which Safari before version 18 ignores, so a background blurred that way would stay sharp there. Instead the photo is shrunk to a few dozen pixels across at the default strength, blurred in script with three box-blur passes, and scaled back up in doubling steps. The result looks the same on every browser.

The strength slider runs from 1 to 10, and the blur spreads roughly blur = 1.2% × strength × the output's long side. At the default of 5 on a 640 square that is about 38 pixels; on a 1080 × 1920 story, about 115.

A plain colour suits a logo or a product shot on white. A PNG logo with a transparent background keeps it: the colour or blur you choose shows through the see-through parts. The download is still a JPEG, so the saved file itself has no transparency. The blur suits people and places, where it continues the scene instead of leaving a hard band.

Choosing the output size

The sizes were measured on a synthetic test image saved as JPEG at quality 0.92; a real photo will differ.

WhatsApp states no size for the everyday app, so a larger file is no guarantee of a sharper DP. The only official figure, from the retired Business API, capped the edge at 640 pixels. The choice matters more for a small photo: one smaller than the output is enlarged, which adds no detail. At 100% photo size, a 400 × 300 photo is stretched 2.7 times across in the 1080 square, and 1.25 times in the 500 square.

The Instagram shapes

The tool also makes three Instagram files, 1,080 pixels wide: a 1:1 post at 1080 × 1080, a 4:5 post at 1080 × 1350 and a 9:16 story at 1080 × 1920. A 4:3 landscape photo comes out 1080 × 810 in each, with bands of 135, 270 and 555 pixels above and below.

Instagram's English help page says photos are shared at up to 1,080 pixels wide. A photo 320 to 1,080 wide keeps its resolution if its ratio is between 1.91:1 and 3:4, a height of 566 to 1,440 at 1,080 wide; other ratios are cropped to a supported one.

The sources disagree about the tallest feed shape. The English page says 3:4, and Instagram's @creators account announced 3:4 support on 28 May 2025. The Gujarati version of the same article still says 4:5, up to 1,350 high, as do most third-party guides. The English text appears to be current. The tool's 4:5 file fits either version; a 3:4 post would be 1080 × 1440, which the tool does not make.

For ordinary stories, no Instagram Help Centre article we found gives a size or ratio. Meta's figures are for story ads, and they disagree: 1,080 × 1,920 in its Business Help Centre, 1440 × 2560 in its Ads Guide, both 9:16. The tool's 9:16 file shares the shape of those ad figures; it is not an official size for ordinary stories. A 9:16 file posted to the feed would be cropped, and Instagram may resize or compress anything you post.

To split one photo across several posts, or draw a grid over it for sketching, use the Grid Maker.

Before you set the DP

• Turn the photo first if it opens sideways.
• Put the subject near the centre. The tool always centres the photo and has no pan control, so crop an off-centre photo in your phone's editor first.
• Check the small round preview under the result, which shows the DP round and small, as in a chat list.
• If WhatsApp's picker shows a crop circle, make it as large as it will go, so the whole square is kept.
• If the browser cannot open an iPhone HEIC photo, the page explains how to share it as a JPEG instead.

What this tool assumes

• WhatsApp publishes no DP size. The 500, 640 and 1080 squares are common sizes, not official ones.
• The photo is always centred and never cropped, with no pan control, no zoom beyond 100%, and a smallest photo size of 50%.
• The download is a JPEG at quality 0.92 with no DPI value. Because the image is redrawn, the original's location and camera details are not carried over.
• Photos are worked on at up to 4,000 pixels on the long side.
• The blur approximates a Gaussian blur rather than being a true one.
• The Instagram sizes are common shapes, with no 3:4 option.
• Nothing is uploaded. The photo is read and redrawn in your browser.