Image Border & Frame Adder

Load the photo, leave the style on solid, pick the white swatch, and switch on "Pad out to a square". The two shorter edges grow until the canvas is 1:1 while your picture stays whole and centred, so the feed has nothing left to crop. Add a little width on top of that if you want a visible margin rather than only the squaring bars: five percent of the shorter side is a good starting point. Export as JPEG for the smallest upload, or PNG if the picture is a screenshot or has flat colour in it.

Not by itself. The original pixels are blitted onto a larger canvas unchanged and untouched: nothing is resampled, resized, or filtered, so at PNG the picture inside the frame is bit for bit what you loaded. Quality is only lost at the encoding step, and only if you choose a lossy format. Exporting a JPEG re-encodes the whole canvas, so a photo that was already a JPEG goes through a second generation of compression. If that matters, export PNG or WebP, or keep the JPEG quality at 92 or above where a second generation is very hard to see.

Percent when the border should look the same across pictures of different sizes, pixels when the number itself matters. A percentage here is measured against the shorter side, so five percent is 100 px on a 2000 px tall portrait and 100 px on a 2000 px wide landscape, and a set of photos framed at the same percentage reads as a set. Pixels are the right choice when you are matching an existing design, filling a known slot, or need a hairline that stays a hairline no matter how large the picture is.

Because JPEG has no alpha channel at all, and never has. It cannot store the idea of an empty pixel, so anything transparent has to be given a colour before the encoder will accept it. That applies to a transparent frame, to rounded corners, and to transparency inside the picture itself. This page paints those pixels with the background colour you set in the export panel and tells you it is doing so, rather than letting the browser pick black on its own. If you need the transparency to survive, export as PNG or WebP instead.

It is a frame with even margins on the top and both sides and a much deeper strip along the bottom, which is what an instant film print looks like because the developing chemistry lived in that strip. The classic proportion is roughly three times the side width at the foot, and this page defaults to exactly that with a slider from one to six times. The deep bottom edge is also useful space: it is where a handwritten date or a caption goes, and it is what makes the look read as a print rather than as a picture with a wide margin.

It is how a print is mounted behind board in a frame shop: a wide mat of flat colour, and then a fine ruled line drawn on the mat running parallel to the picture a fixed distance out from its edge. The line is what stops a wide pale mat from looking like an accident. Use it when the frame is doing presentation work rather than only providing space, for a portfolio page, a print mock-up, or a gallery-style social post. Both the gap and the line thickness are clamped so they always fit inside the frame width you set.

Yes, completely. The export is drawn onto a fresh canvas and encoded from scratch, and a canvas has nowhere to keep the metadata that came with the original: no camera model, no lens, no shutter and aperture, no timestamp, and no GPS coordinates. Embedded colour profiles go with them. Orientation is the one exception, and it survives because it is not carried through as metadata: the browser's own decoder applies the EXIF orientation tag before anything is drawn, so a photo shot sideways is framed upright and the rotation is baked into real pixels. If you need the metadata kept, this is the wrong tool, and if you were hoping to remove it, framing does that as a side effect.

Three things are usually happening at once. The canvas has more pixels in it than the original did, because a border adds area. The export is a re-encode, and a browser's encoder is tuned for speed rather than for the last few percent that a dedicated compressor would find. And if you loaded a JPEG and exported a PNG, you have swapped a lossy codec for a lossless one, which routinely multiplies the size of a photograph several times over. The frame itself is rarely the culprit: flat colour costs almost nothing to store. Export as JPEG or WebP if size matters, and run the result through the image compressor afterwards.

No, and the page says so when you load one. A GIF is decoded here as a still, a single frame is framed, and the export is one picture. Keeping the animation would mean decoding every frame, re-timing them, and re-encoding a new GIF, which is a different tool with a very different cost. If the animation matters, frame it in a video or animation editor instead. The still export is still useful for a thumbnail or a cover image.

One file up to 25 MB, a source up to 40 megapixels, and a finished canvas no more than 8,192 pixels on its longest side or 40 megapixels in total. They exist because every one of those pixels is real memory in your tab: a decoded picture costs four bytes per pixel, and the framed copy costs that again, so a 40 megapixel photo is already several hundred megabytes of working set before the encoder starts. The page also warns you when the output passes roughly 16.8 megapixels, because some phone browsers quietly cap a canvas around there and hand back a blank image rather than an error.