Add a border to a picture

A border goes on the outer edge of a photograph so the picture reads as a print, a card, a strip of film or a page from an album — something made, rather than something cropped. Most of the time it is chosen by eye; sometimes it has to be exact, like a 20-pixel white rule or a picture that must land on an Instagram 4:5 canvas without losing anything. This studio does both.

By eye first. The style browser on the left holds every style in the library, each one drawn on the photograph you opened — by the same code that writes the saved file, so a tile is the file in miniature. Thickness is a proportion of the short edge, or an exact width in pixels, millimetres or inches. Colours can come straight from the picture. Corners, a shadow, a background and a texture finish it, and one switch decides whether the border covers the outer edge of the photograph or is added around it.

1. 1Open a photograph by dropping it on the table, choosing one, or pasting from the clipboard. Nothing is sent anywhere; the file is read where it sits.
2. 2Pick a style. The browser opens on the everyday styles and holds five families in all — styles, cut edges, soft edges, depth and pattern — each tile your own picture in that style. Shuffle tries a tasteful variant of the family on show.
3. 3Set the thickness with the slider, by typing a figure, or by dragging the square grip at the border's inner corner. Inside draws it over the picture's edge; Outside adds it around.
4. 4Match the colour. One tap on a Match photo suggestion recolours the whole border from the picture's palette, or press I and click anywhere on the photo to take that exact colour.
5. 5Finish and save. Round the corners — or drag the round puck at the top-left corner — add a shadow, a background behind rounded corners and a texture, then save PNG, JPG or WebP at full or half size.

Reads directly

JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and GIF, through the browser's own decoder, on every browser this site supports.

Reads if your browser does

BMP, TIFF and ICO go to the same decoder and are therefore at its mercy. Safari reads TIFF; Chrome and Firefox generally do not, and no TIFF decoder ships here, so one may be declined with the reason named rather than failing quietly.

Reads on demand

HEIC and HEIF, by fetching a WebAssembly decoder the first time one of them is opened and not before.

Writes

PNG at full depth, JPG at a quality you set, and WebP where the browser can write it.

Size ceiling

32 megapixels before a lighter working copy is offered — 16 on iOS — and 100 megapixels before the page declines. Files stop at 120 MB.

A few situations change what comes out, and all of them are said on screen before you save rather than discovered afterwards. A very wide panorama puts the band's proportions under strain, because a proportion of the short edge is a small share of the long one. A picture with transparent areas keeps them under an over-drawn band, but added-around fills the new band with solid colour and leaves the middle clear, which is rarely the intention — there is a white backing on offer when that happens. An animated GIF or WebP is framed on its first frame. A CMYK JPG is converted by the browser without a managed profile, so the frame colours and the photograph will sit a little apart.

• A frame does not improve a photograph. On a busy picture a wide ornate band makes the whole thing harder to read, and half the shelf is the wrong answer for any given image. The guide on choosing one says which half.
• These colours are sRGB and they are aimed at a screen. Nothing here manages colour for a printer, and an olive that looks right on a monitor may come back from a lab noticeably different. That is outside what this page can promise.

How does Match photo choose a colour?

It reads a small copy of your picture in the page and splits its colours with median cut — the box of colours with the widest spread is halved at its median, again and again, until eight groups remain. Their averages become the palette, ranked by how much of the picture each one covers. The suggestions are built from that: the dominant colour, a pale mat from the lightest tone, a deep one from the darkest, and the most saturated accent. A picture that is essentially one colour gets its own tone, a paper white and an ink instead of five near-identical greys. None of it touches the network.

Can I put the same border on a whole set of photos?

Yes. Frame more photos with this look sends the recipe on screen — style, colours, corner, shadow, background and texture — to the folder surface, and each picture gets it as a share of its own short edge, so a phone snap and a 24-megapixel file come out with borders of the same proportion. Every row reports what it got, and the results download together as a ZIP written in the page.

Scalloped frames usually have one corner where the arcs do not line up. Why not this one?

Because the arc width you set is a target rather than a measurement. Each of the four sides is divided by that target, the result is rounded to a whole number of arcs, and the arc width is then recomputed as the side length divided by that count. A 1200-pixel side asked for 47-pixel arcs gets 26 arcs of 46.15 instead of 26 arcs of 47 and a 22-pixel stub. The top and bottom carry a different count from the sides on a rectangular picture, which is correct: they are different lengths, and forcing one count across all four is what produces the stub.

Can I set the border in pixels, millimetres or inches?

Yes. The Width control under Border takes a share of the short edge (the default), pixels, millimetres or inches; millimetres and inches are converted at the print resolution you set, 300 DPI unless you change it, and the readout prints the result — 10 mm at 300 DPI is 118 px. Unlink the sides to give the top, right, bottom and left their own widths. A share of the short edge is still the default because it keeps a decorative band in proportion on a phone snap and a 40-megapixel file alike; a pixel width stays the same number of pixels on every picture.

I saved a scalloped frame as a JPG and the notches came out white.

That is the format, not the frame. A cut edge leaves the area outside the cut genuinely empty, and JPG has no channel in which to store empty — so anything clear is written as white on the way out. PNG and WebP both keep it clear. If the frame is going onto a coloured background somewhere else, save PNG.

The deckle edge looked different after I reloaded the page.

It would have, before the seed was put on screen. Every torn and deckled outline comes from one number, shown under the sliders, and that number decides the whole shape of the tear. Re-rolling it draws a different tear; leaving it alone reproduces the same one at any size. What a reload does not preserve is the number itself, so keep the look (Save → Keep this look) or write the number down if a particular tear matters.

Can I save the frame on its own, with the middle left clear?

Not yet. The frame-only export is a real thing this renderer could do — the band is already drawn separately from the picture — but it is not in this release, and saying so is more use than a coming-soon banner. What you can do today is save a PNG with a cut edge, which keeps everything outside the cut clear.

Does a wider band make the photograph look better?

It makes it look framed, which is not the same thing. A wide ornate band on a busy photograph gives the eye two competing sets of detail and the picture usually loses. Thin bands suit crowded pictures; wide ones suit quiet, simple ones. There is a whole page on this under the guides, and it argues against about half the shelf.

A few things are refused on purpose. Nothing here sets free text on a picture. Nothing places a logo, a sticker or a repeating mark on the picture. Nothing regrades the photograph itself — the soft vignette darkens toward the edge like a border does, and the textures sit on the border, never on the picture. And nothing arranges several pictures together; the folder mode puts the same border on each one, separately.

The formats cost something too, and it is worth knowing which before you save rather than after. PNG is the honest default: rounded corners, a shadow on a clear background and every cut edge leave parts of the file genuinely empty, and PNG stores empty at full quality. WebP keeps it clear as well and writes a smaller file. JPG has no clear channel, so anything outside the border comes back white — choose a background colour first if white is wrong. The frame-only export, which would hand you the border with the middle left open, is not in this release.

A gallery of the everyday styles, routes that open the studio on a particular job — an exact white border, an Instagram fit, an instant print, the full frame editor — and three pages of reading. The cut-edge route opens on the scallop with the arc and tear controls already in front. The guides carry the arguments the controls are too small to make — including the one that says half the shelf is wrong for whatever picture you have open.

• Add white borderAn exact white border in pixels, percent, millimetres or inches, on every side or each side.
• Instagram white borderThe whole photo on an exact Instagram 4:5, 1:1, 3:4 or Story canvas, nothing cropped.
• Polaroid frameAn instant-print style card in square, wide or mini proportions, with the deep bottom margin.
• Photo frame editorAll 32 frames drawn on your own photo, recoloured from the picture and saved at full size.
• Border stylesThe eight everyday styles drawn side by side, each opening in the tool on your own photo.
• Scalloped edgeThe shelf opened on the cut edges, with arc width and depth in front.
• Frame guidesThree written pages on cut edges, matching a frame to a picture, and how the shelf is drawn.
• Scallops and decklesWhere the two cut edges come from, and what the controls do to them.
• Choosing a frameBusy pictures take thin frames. Quiet ones can carry a wide band.
• Drawn, not photographedWhy every frame here is a path, and why there are no photographed frames.
• AboutWho runs this and what it is for.