Square is the shape social platforms and product grids keep asking for, and cameras never produce. The usual response is to crop, which means deciding what to cut — and on a group photo or a tall product shot, everything you cut matters.
This tool takes the other approach: it pads. The image is centred on a square canvas whose side equals the longer of its two dimensions, and the gaps at top and bottom, or left and right, are filled with white or black. Nothing is cropped, nothing is scaled, and the picture stays exactly as you framed it.
The padding is drawn on a canvas in your browser. Product shots and personal photos are squared locally.
| Square Image (pad) | Crop Image (cut) | |
|---|---|---|
| Content | Entirely preserved | Edges removed |
| Composition | Unchanged, with bars added | Reframed — often tighter and better |
| Effort | One click, batchable | Manual, one image at a time |
| Best for | Product shots, group photos, documents | Portraits, anything with a clear subject |
The rule of thumb: pad when losing any part of the frame would lose information, crop when the subject sits comfortably in the middle and the edges are just context.
Instagram feed posts, profile pictures on most platforms, album artwork, marketplace listing thumbnails and product grids on e-commerce sites all default to square. A non-square image submitted to any of them will be cropped automatically, by an algorithm that does not know which part of your photo matters.
Padding first takes that decision away from the platform. Your image arrives already square, so it is displayed whole exactly as you intended.
No. The image is padded rather than cropped — it is centred on a square canvas and the gaps are filled with your chosen colour. Every pixel of the original is preserved.
The longer of the original two dimensions. A 1600 × 900 photo becomes 1600 × 1600 with bars above and below.
Match the background where the image will be displayed. White disappears on light pages and in most social feeds in light mode; black suits dark layouts and looks more cinematic.
White and black are the options here. For any other colour, use the Add Border tool, which accepts a full colour picker.
Yes. Each image is squared to its own longer edge, so a mixed set of portrait and landscape photos all come out square, though at different pixel sizes.
No. The canvas is created and painted inside your browser.