Put a border or padding around a picture
Frame a photo, or pad it out to a square or 16:9 without cropping anything. Free, no signup, and the whole picture is kept whatever shape you ask for.
Drop files here (up to 50)
or paste from the clipboard
Preview
Choose an image and the result appears here as you change the options.
Shows the framing and geometry exactly. Compression quality is not simulated.
How it works
A new canvas is created larger than the picture by the border on each side, filled with the colour you chose, and the original is drawn into the middle of it at its own size. When a shape is requested the canvas grows further on whichever side is short for that proportion — never shrinking, so no part of the image is ever cut off. The thickness is a percentage of the shorter side rather than a pixel count, which is what makes one setting behave the same across files of different sizes.
What to watch out for
Fitting a landscape photograph into a square here adds space above and below it. A crop tool would cut the sides off instead. Both are reasonable answers to "make this square" and they produce completely different pictures, so it is worth being deliberate about which one you actually want.
Choosing transparency writes it faithfully into a PNG or a WebP. A JPEG cannot store an alpha channel at all, so the request is honoured as white rather than refused — because the alternative, what an unfilled JPEG actually produces, is black, and nobody asking for no border wants a black one.
Padding a wide photograph out to a square can add half again as many pixels, and every one of them has to be stored. A flat border compresses well, so the increase is smaller than the pixel count suggests, but a batch prepared for a square grid will still take noticeably more space than the originals did.
Limits
Files up to about 50 MB work reliably. Beyond that, the ceiling is your device's memory rather than any rule we impose — the work happens on your own machine. Tested in Chrome 140, Firefox 143, Safari 18.
Why padding exists when cropping already does
Somewhere between a photograph and where it is going, a shape gets decided by somebody else. A social grid wants squares. A slide wants sixteen by nine. A print service wants four by five.
The usual answer is to crop, and cropping throws away the parts of the picture that do not fit. For a landscape that is often the whole point of the photograph. Growing the canvas instead keeps everything and fills the new space with a colour, which is why a photograph posted this way reads as a deliberate frame rather than as a picture somebody trimmed badly.
The thickness is relative on purpose
Ten pixels is a heavy frame on a thumbnail and an invisible hairline on a photo from a modern phone. If you drop in a mixed batch — a screenshot, a scan and a camera file — a fixed pixel border gives you three different-looking results.
Five percent of the shorter side gives all three the same look, because it is the proportion the eye reads rather than the count.
Both operations at once
The two settings combine, and the order they are applied in is the one that produces what people expect: the border is added first, then the canvas grows to reach the shape if a shape was asked for. So a five percent white border on a landscape photograph padded to a square gives an even frame all the way round, with the extra height needed for the square added beyond it.
It happens here, not somewhere else
Everything is drawn in a Web Worker inside this tab. The picture is not uploaded, so there is no wait for a transfer, no daily allowance, and no copy left behind on a machine you do not control. Fifty files can be framed in one pass.
Your files never leave your browser. Last updated 2026-08-07.
Next step
Your file is already here in this browser, so the next tool starts with it loaded.
- Compress a JPGShrink JPG photos free with MozJPEG, the encoder Mozilla built for the web. Typically 20 to 40 percent smaller, with no watermark and no daily limit.
- Watermark a photo with your own textStamp your name, a URL or a notice across a picture, free and with no signup. Choose the corner, the size, the angle and how faint it sits.
Related tools
- Crop an imageDrag a box over your photo to crop it, free and with no account. Works with the keyboard too, and the picture is never uploaded anywhere.
- Resize an imageChange an image's dimensions free, with no signup and no watermark. Set a width, a height or both, keep the aspect ratio, and pick the output format.