Make an image square without cropping it

How to make an image square

To make a picture square here, you do not have to set the shape: 1:1 is already picked.

1. Press Select images, or drop one or more pictures onto the page.
2. The stage shows your picture inside a square, with the added space in the Colour, White to start with.
3. Pick another Colour if you like, or press Pick from picture and click a colour in the picture.
4. Under Picture position, choose where the picture sits; Centre is the default.
5. Drag Extra margin if you want space all round, so the picture does not touch the edges.
6. Press Add border, then save. The file name ends in _padded.

The square is as wide as the picture's longer side. A 4000 × 3000 photo becomes 4000 × 4000, with 500 pixels of colour above it and 500 below when it is centred. A tall 3000 × 4000 photo gets its space at the sides instead. The Result line under the panel shows the new size, with an estimate of the file size.

Square image without cropping, or a square crop?

There are two ways to get a square picture: pad it into a square image without cropping, or crop it. They suit different pictures.

• A logo or a badge, where every letter must stay.
• A group photo, where the people at the ends would be cut by a crop.
• Artwork, a poster or a book cover, which should be shown whole.
• A wide panorama, which a square crop would reduce to a thin slice of the scene.

If the bands of colour do not suit the picture, a crop may look better: crop image to square lets you drag a square over the part to keep. For a product shot on white, padding with White is usually invisible, because the new space matches the old background.

Colour, position and margin

Three controls decide how the square looks. The stage shows every change as you make it.

Colour: white background or anything else

To add a white background and make it square, keep White. The Colour row also has Ink, Black, Grey, Red, Yellow and Transparent, plus any colour from the + swatch. Pick from picture takes a colour from the picture itself, which suits a photo whose edge is a plain wall or sky.

Transparent leaves the added space empty. It is saved as PNG or WebP, since a JPG cannot hold transparency, so JPG under Save as is switched off while it is picked.

If you also want a negative of the picture, invert photo colours first and square it afterwards. Inverting turns every pixel to its opposite, so white space added before it would come out black.

Picture position: where the picture sits

Picture position is a 3 × 3 grid, from Top left to Bottom right. On a wide picture only the up and down part matters: Top centre puts all the space below the picture, a handy place for a caption. On a tall picture, left and right matter instead.

A flip turns the whole square, space and all. Make an upside down image of a Top centre square and the space ends up above the picture; flip photo mirrors a tall picture placed Middle left, so its space moves from the right side to the left. Flip the picture first, then choose the position here.

Extra margin: breathing room

Extra margin adds space on every side, from 0 to 20 % of the picture's shorter side. With 5 % on a 4000 × 3000 photo, 150 pixels are added all round before the square is made, so the result is 4300 × 4300 and the picture no longer touches the left and right edges.

A margin also helps when the square is headed for a round crop. On a square, circle crop image can draw its circle across the whole picture, and each extra per cent of margin gives a wide logo more room inside that circle.

Fit a photo in a square of an exact size

A square fit made by padding keeps your picture's own pixels, so a large photo gives a large square. When a site asks for a set size, fit the image in a square here first, then resize it.

1. Make the picture square on this page and save it.
2. Open the square in Resize image and type the width you need, such as 1080. With Keep the proportions on, the height follows.
3. Or, for a feed post, open it in resize image for Instagram, which makes 1080 × 1080.

Need another shape? The Shape chips on this page also offer 4:5, 9:16, 16:9 and 3:2, so you can pad a picture to a tall story shape or a wide banner the same way. If the picture already has the shape you pick and Extra margin is 0, there is nothing to add, and the panel says: The picture already has this shape. Add a margin, or pick another shape. The other choice under Add, A border, puts an even frame around the picture instead; the Add border to image page explains its widths and colours.

Many pictures at once, privately

Select up to 100 pictures to make every one square in a single run, a whole shop catalogue for example. Each is padded to its own square with the same Colour, position and margin: a wide picture gets its bands above and below, a tall one at the sides. The button counts them (Add border to 40 pictures), and Save all as ZIP saves them together. Squares also make a tidy animation: select the saved files in Images to GIF, and no frame has to be cropped or padded again to fit.

Save as Original keeps a JPG as a JPG and a PNG as a PNG; an iPhone HEIC photo becomes a JPG. JPG and WebP are saved at high quality, and PNG keeps every pixel. The saved picture is drawn fresh, with no location, camera or date details.

• It runs in your browser: the picture is never uploaded, and our server does no picture work.
• It is free, with no account and no watermark. Image tools are not counted in the daily limit, which applies to document conversions only.
• It works in current Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Very large pictures may be too big for your browser.