How to put an image on top of a white circle?

[Jonathan22653123dn92]

I made a white elipse using the shape tool in Adobe illustrator.  I then opened an image so that I have the elipse and the image in a single layer as pictured below. 

The resulting image looks like this.

I am trying to have the image just over the circle and save it as one.  When i try to export as PNG the background completely dissapears and i am left with no circle as my background.  It seems to take just the image and gets rid of the elipse shape and I get the following.

Even if i change background color to white it just fills the entire background not the white elipse shape.  My question is: How do i get the image and the white elipse to merge as one so that the image is on top of a white circle? Please help, I have tried everything.

[Monika Gause]

Did you apply a white fill to the ellipse?

Can you select it and show the appearance panel?

[Ton Frederiks]

Did you move the white circle below the image? Did you selct them both or group them?

[Kurt Gold]

As Monika already guessed, the thumbnail in your Layers palette just indicates that the circle has no fill and stroke attributes. On the artboard it may look as if it is filled with a white fill colour, but apparently it is not.

Should be easy to fix.

[michelew83603738]

Double check to see that the center circle is indeed filled with white.

[Anna Lander]

1. In the Layers panel take the image and move it up. You also can select it on the artboard and click Ctrl(Cmd)+] to move the object up directly.

2. Follow the other colleagues' suggestions, check the ellipse attributes, set Fill as White, Stroke as None (now it looks like both are None).

3. Export as PNG with transparent background.