Chelsea Manning has posted the first picture of herself since she was released from a US prison for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks.

The soldier turned whistleblower appeared as an out trans woman for the first time in the image posted on a new Instagram account.

It was captioned "Okay, so here I am everyone!! ? #HelloWorld".

Other pictures showed her toasting her "freedom and a new beginning" with sparkling wine and pizza.

Manning, who was previously known as Bradley, was convicted in 2013 of leaking a huge cache of American military and diplomatic papers.

She was initially given 35 years in prison after being convicted by court-martial, but former President Barack Obama reduced her sentence so she could be released early.

During Manning's trial it emerged she had copied some 250,000 diplomatic cables from American embassies around the world.

Hundreds of thousands of military incident logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were also copied before being disclosed to WikiLeaks.

Shortly after being convicted she revealed that she identified as a woman and changed her name to Chelsea.