Add Border to Image

Outside or inside: this is the setting that matters

The first choice on the page, and the one that decides whether the result is usable. Nobody else explains it.

Outside expands the canvas. The border is added around your photo, so the image gets bigger — a 1080×1080 picture with a 20-pixel border becomes 1120×1120. Nothing is covered up, and the whole of your photo survives.

Inside draws the border over the edge of the photo. The dimensions stay exactly as they were — 1080×1080 in, 1080×1080 out — and the outermost 20 pixels of your image are hidden underneath the border.

Which you want depends entirely on the constraint you are working to:

Use inside when the size is fixed. A platform that demands exactly 1080×1080, an image slot in a template, a product photo that has to match the others in a grid, a favicon or an avatar at a specific pixel size. Outside would break all of those, and the platform would then resize or crop your image to fit — undoing your border in the process.

Use outside when the photo matters more than the dimensions. A print, a framed picture, anything where losing the outer edge of the image would cut into the subject.

Inner padding turns a border into a mount

The setting worth knowing about, because it produces a look that normally needs a template.

Inner padding adds space between your photo and the border. Set the background — the padding takes the border colour — and you get the matte effect of a framed print: photo, then a band of white or off-white, then a thin dark line around the outside.

The combination that works: a thin border of 2 to 5 pixels, generous padding of 20 to 40, in white or a warm off-white. That reads as a gallery print rather than a picture with a line around it, and it is the single easiest way to make a photograph look considered on a feed full of edge-to-edge images.

Invert it for a different effect: heavy border, no padding, in a colour pulled out of the photo itself. That reads as bold and graphic rather than quiet.

Three styles, and when the unusual ones are right

Solid is the default and the right answer for photographs, prints and anything that should look finished. It is a frame; it does not draw attention to itself.

Dashed reads as provisional, which is occasionally exactly what you want. A placeholder image in a mockup, a "drop your file here" illustration, a diagram element marked as optional. On a photograph it usually looks like a mistake.

Double — two lines with a gap — is the classic certificate and formal-document border. It suits a title page, an award, an invitation, anything deliberately traditional. It needs width to work: below about 10 pixels the two lines merge visually and you have wasted the effect.

Rounded corners, and the size to use

Rounded corners soften an image and make it read as a card rather than a photograph, which is why interfaces use them constantly.

The radius is the thing to get right, and the mistake is going too far. Somewhere between 8 and 16 pixels reads as modern and deliberate on a normal-sized image. Much more and it starts to look like a novelty; much less and you cannot tell it is not square. The one exception is a small image like an avatar, where a large radius relative to the size is the point.

Keep it in proportion: 12 pixels on a 1080-pixel image is a subtle curve, and 12 pixels on a 200-pixel thumbnail is very round indeed.

What you get back

A PNG comes back as a PNG with its transparency intact, which matters if the border is going around a logo or a cut-out. Anything else — a JPEG, a WebP — comes back as a JPEG, so transparent areas become white.

Everything happens on your own device. No upload, no account, no watermark, and no size limit imposed by someone else's server.

What this is not

It is a border, not a frame library. There are no decorative frames, no drop shadows, no textures or ornaments — those come from a design tool with a template collection. What you get here is geometric and clean, which for a photograph is usually what you actually want.

And be careful with a thick inside border: it is covering real content. On a tightly cropped photo, 40 pixels of inside border can clip a hairline, an edge of a product, or the bottom of some text. Check the preview rather than assuming there is spare room at the edges.

Related tools

Crop Image reframes the photo first, which is the right order if the composition needs work. Collage Maker arranges several photos and has its own border and corner controls. Compress Image reduces the finished file for uploading.