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Framing
Add a border to an image
Two jobs really: putting a frame around a picture, and padding a tall or wide photo out to a square so a platform that insists on square thumbnails stops cutting your subject in half.
Preview
Padding instead of cropping
Social platforms and marketplaces usually crop to a fixed shape, and they crop from the centre, which is rarely where your subject is. Padding the image out to the shape they want, with a border filling the difference, means they have nothing left to cut. The whole photograph survives.
Thickness is a percentage of the longest edge, so a border looks the same on a small image and a large one. White reads as a print mat and suits most photographs; near black suits bright images and screenshots.
Common questions
Does the image get resized?
No. The original pixels are placed unchanged and the canvas around them grows, so the output is larger in dimensions than the input.
Can I have a transparent border?
Save as PNG and pick a colour you will replace later, or use the circle crop tool, which produces genuine transparency.
Other image tools