Room for the circle to crop
A WhatsApp DP is shown in a circle, so a square photo with the face near an edge loses part of it. Uncropping to a square with space around the subject gives the circle room to crop without cutting the face.
"WhatsApp DP size" is a 50K-a-month search in India; this prepares a full-face DP by adding space, not by zooming in and clipping.
Questions
Does my photo get uploaded?
No. The picture is read, grown and encoded by code running in this browser tab. It is never sent to a server — there is no server to send it to. The only download that ever happens is the optional edge-painter model, which travels one way, from our model file server to you.
Why does my DP look cut off now?
WhatsApp fits your photo into a circle. If the face fills the frame, the circle clips its sides. Adding a square margin around it fixes that.
What size should the DP be?
A square of roughly 640×640 or larger is plenty. This keeps your photo square so WhatsApp shows the whole face in the circle.