How to crop a photo for a CV or profile

Crop for how it will be displayed

Profile pictures are shown at a few dozen pixels in most places. A full length photo at that size is an unidentifiable smudge, which is why headshots are the convention. Fill the frame with your face.

Assume it will be cropped to a circle. Most platforms do this, and the corners of your square simply vanish, so anything important near them is lost. Leaving margin at the sides costs nothing and protects against it.

Skip the background removal. A plain office wall or a softly blurred background reads as normal and professional. A hard cutout pasted onto flat white reads as a passport photo, which is a different thing and not usually the impression wanted.

Checking it at the size it will be seen

A profile picture is seen small, so judge it small. Shrink your view until it is the size of a thumbnail and check that your face is clear and fills about the top two thirds of the frame. A tight head and shoulders crop reads better than a full body shot.

Use the square shape, because most sites crop to a square or a circle, and then keep the face in the middle so that a round crop does not cut anything off. If a site has a file size limit, run the result through Compress image afterwards.