---
title: "Make square and add padding — free, runs in your browser"
description: "Make an image square without cropping, add a border, or add a print safe margin. Free, no sign-up, and nothing you enter leaves your browser."
url: https://atoneplace.net/tools/image-padding/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Make square and add padding

Make an image square without cropping, add a border, or add a print safe margin.

## How it works

Pads an image out to a square, or to any ratio, without cropping anything — the image is centred and the space around it filled with a colour or left transparent. Also adds a plain border or a print safe margin.

This is the answer to the platform that demands a square and crops your image to get one. Padding preserves the whole frame; cropping throws away the edges. For product photography and logos, padding is almost always what you actually wanted.

Transparent padding requires PNG or WebP output. Choosing JPEG silently fills transparency with black, which is the usual reason a padded logo comes out with a black box around it — the tool switches to PNG rather than letting that happen quietly.

The print safe margin exists because commercial printing trims the sheet after printing, with a tolerance of a couple of millimetres. Anything important within about 5 mm of the edge risks being cut off.

> This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server, logged or stored, and the page keeps working with the network disconnected.

## Common questions

### How do I make an image square without cropping it?

Pad it. The image is centred and the surrounding space is filled with a colour or left transparent, so nothing is lost.

### Why did my transparent padding come out black?

Because the output was JPEG, which has no transparency and fills it with black. Use PNG or WebP.

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## Sources

- Calculated on this page — At One Place (/about/)