Square without cropping
Most photos are rectangles: 4:3 from phones, 3:2 from cameras, 16:9 from screenshots and video frames. When a site or app needs a square — a profile picture, a product listing, an album cover, a classic Instagram grid — it usually crops your photo and cuts off heads, feet or text. This tool does the opposite: it keeps the whole picture and adds space around it.
The square’s side equals the longest side of your image, so the photo stays at full resolution and is centered. A landscape photo gets bars above and below; a portrait photo gets bars left and right. An image that is already square only changes if you add a margin.
Background options
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Padding color | Fills the empty space with a solid color. White is the default; black or a brand color work too. |
| Blurred photo as background | Fills the space with a blurred, slightly darker, enlarged copy of the photo instead of a solid color. |
| Extra margin | Adds 0 to 20% around the whole image, so even the long side doesn’t touch the edge. |
With a solid padding color the square is fully filled: the transparent areas of a PNG logo also show that color, so pick the one you want behind it. With the blurred background, the blurred copy is made from the same image, so transparent parts stay partly see-through.
Formats and quality
Each image is saved in the format it came in when the browser can write it: JPG stays JPG (92% quality), PNG stays PNG, WebP stays WebP (PNG in Safari, which can’t save WebP). HEIC and AVIF files are saved as JPG, and SVG, GIF or BMP as PNG. Saving several images at once gives you a ZIP with one square file per image.
When to pad and when to crop
Padding is best when the whole picture matters: products, artwork, group photos, screenshots, logos. Cropping is better when you want the subject to fill the frame. A quick test: if cutting a strip off either side would remove something people need to see — a name, a hand, a product edge — pad it.
For a square post at Instagram’s recommended 1080 × 1080 px, make the image square here first; the result keeps your photo’s resolution, so a large photo gives a large square that Instagram scales down without cropping. To fit an exact size for a network — an Instagram portrait post, a LinkedIn banner or a YouTube thumbnail — with either cropping or bars, use the Social Media Image Resizer. To add an even frame instead of a square canvas, try Add Border to Image, and to spread one photo over several posts, the Instagram Grid Maker.
Private by design
Your photos are processed by the browser’s Canvas API on your own device and never uploaded. The page keeps working offline once loaded. The saved files are rebuilt from pixels, so EXIF metadata such as GPS location is not copied into them.