Square Image Maker

Make a photo square without cropping it

Many places show pictures in a fixed shape, and a wide or tall photo then loses its edges. This square image maker keeps the whole photo instead. It scales the picture to fit inside a square, a 4:5 portrait or a 9:16 story frame, centers it and fills the empty space around it with a blurred copy of the same photo, a solid color or nothing at all. Several photos can be done at once and saved together as a ZIP file.

To cut a photo to a square instead, use the image cropper. For any other exact size with the same fit and pad method, the image resizer has a Fit and pad option. The sizes the big platforms ask for are listed on the social media image sizes page, and screenshots look best in a browser or phone frame from the screenshot mockup generator.

Shapes and output sizes

With 1080 or 2048, that number is the width and the height follows from the shape. Original builds the smallest canvas of the chosen shape that holds your photo at its full size, so the photo is not scaled at all. Here is what a 4,032 × 3,024 phone photo (4:3) becomes:

For ads, Meta’s ads guide recommends 4:5 at 1440 × 1800 pixels for Instagram feed images, with shapes from 1.91:1 to 4:5 supported, and 9:16 at 1440 × 2560 for Instagram Stories. Any size of the right shape fits those slots; the shape is what this tool takes care of.

On iPhone and iPad, WebKit limits the area of a canvas, the drawing surface the image is made on. If an Original image would be larger than that, it is scaled down just enough to fit, and the list says so.

How the photo is placed

The tool first takes the padding off every side. The padding is a share of the width, which is the shorter side for all three shapes. The photo is then scaled by the smaller of two factors, so it fits both ways, and centered:

scale = min((W − 2p) ÷ w, (H − 2p) ÷ h)

W and H are the canvas size, w and h the photo size, and p the padding in pixels. Worked example, computed with this tool: a 1,200 × 800 photo in a 1080 square with 10% padding. The padding is 108 pixels, which leaves 864 × 864. The scale is min(864 ÷ 1,200, 864 ÷ 800) = 0.72, so the photo becomes 864 × 576 and sits 108 pixels from the left and 252 pixels from the top. The same photo with Original and 10% padding gets a 1500 × 1500 canvas: 1,200 ÷ (1 − 2 × 0.1) = 1,500, with the photo at full size in the middle.

Blurred, colored or transparent background

• Blurred photo: a copy of the same photo is scaled up until it covers the whole canvas, then blurred, so the background picks up the colors of the photo. At 100% the blur radius, the standard deviation of the Gaussian blur, is 5% of the width, 54 pixels on a 1080 image. The blur is worked out on a smaller copy and scaled back up, which looks the same and works in every browser.
• Color: one solid color. White suits product photos and documents, black suits dark photos.
• Transparent: the space around the photo stays see-through. PNG and WebP can store that; JPG cannot, so it is switched off for this background.

How to make an image square

1. 1Drop one or more photos on the box or tap it to choose them. HEIC photos from an iPhone work too.
2. 2Pick the shape, the output size and the background, and add padding if you want space around the photo.
3. 3Check the preview. Tap another photo in the list to preview it.
4. 4Press Download next to a photo, or Download all (.zip) for every photo at once.

Sources

• Meta Ads Guide: Instagram feed image ads: 4:5 at 1440 × 1800 recommended, shapes from 1.91:1 to 4:5
• Meta Ads Guide: Instagram Stories image ads: 9:16 at 1440 × 2560 recommended
• WebKit source, CanvasBase.cpp: a smaller maximum canvas area on iPhone and iPad
• W3C PNG Specification: alpha channel for transparency

Built by Tobias. Updated October 20, 2026.

Frequently asked questions