Expand a picture without cropping it

It makes the canvas bigger. That is the whole idea, and it is worth being precise about what it means, because three other things sound like it and are not. Your photograph is copied into a larger grid at its own size, landing on whole-number coordinates with smoothing turned off for that one draw, and then the space around it is painted. The rows and columns you photographed are the same rows and columns when you save.

Nothing here resamples the original photograph.

So the thing that grows is the frame, not the picture. A 1080 by 1920 photo from a phone asked for 16:9 comes back as 3,413 by 1,920: the height is untouched, 2,333 columns of new material appear at the sides, and roughly two thirds of what you are looking at was built rather than taken. That proportion is printed under the canvas the whole time you are working, because it is the number that tells you whether the shape you asked for was a reasonable thing to ask of this photograph.

The other direction works the same way round. A wide photograph asked for 9:16 grows downward and upward rather than losing its sides, and a photograph of any shape asked for a square grows whichever axis is short. One rule, applied consistently: the axis that is too small grows, and the axis that is already big enough is left alone.

Coming in: JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, TIFF and ICO, plus HEIC from an iPhone, which pulls in a decoder the first time one arrives rather than making every visitor carry it. Going out: JPG, PNG and WebP, which are the three every browser can genuinely write. A file heavier than 120 MB is refused before it is opened, and a photograph past roughly 32 megapixels — 16 on an iPhone — stops and asks whether a lighter working copy is acceptable, because the canvas being built is larger than the photograph going into it.

A few file types arrive with something worth mentioning, and the tool mentions it under the canvas rather than burying it here. A JPG written for a printing press carries four ink channels instead of three screen ones, so the browser converts it and the colour shifts very slightly. A picture that already has see-through pixels at its edge makes mirror and stretch copy that emptiness outward, so the rail points you at a colour or a gradient instead. And a file with more than one frame is opened at the first.

• Nothing here knows what was actually outside the frame

  Every fill on this page is arithmetic on the pixels you already have: reflected, smeared, blurred, averaged or swept. None of them is a guess at the room you were standing in. On sky, grass, water, wallpaper and fabric that distinction does not matter, because more of the same thing is the truthful answer. On a straight architectural line, a tiled floor, a line of text or a face at the edge, it matters enormously, and no slider in the rail will rescue it.

• There is no generated fill here, and the gap is on purpose

  A model small enough to run in a browser tab is a download of several hundred megabytes that iOS will not reliably keep, needs WebGPU that a great many phones either lack or hobble, and takes twenty to ninety seconds for one pass on an ordinary laptop. It also fails visibly on exactly the subjects listed above. We would rather ship five fills that take a few milliseconds on every device than one button that works on some machines, some of the time, and crashes the tab on the rest.

• An animated file comes out as a single still

  A GIF or an animated WebP is opened at its first frame and saved as one picture. Expanding every frame of an animation, keeping the timing and writing the container back out is a genuinely different program, and a tool that quietly threw away ninety frames without saying so would be worse than one that says this out loud.

I asked for 16:9 and the picture got wider instead of shorter. Is that a mistake?

No, it is the one decision this whole site is built on. There are two ways to turn a 1080 by 1920 photo into a 16:9 one: add 2,333 columns of something to the sides, or delete 1,312 rows off the top and bottom. The second is a crop, and a crop is what you came here to avoid, so the width grows every time. If you did want the trim, that is a different job and a different tool — the dashed box under Placement will show you exactly what it would have taken.

Will the part of the picture I actually took come out softer than the original?

It cannot. Your photograph is copied into the bigger grid one pixel to one pixel, at whole-number coordinates, with smoothing switched off for that single draw. No scaling happens to it at any point, so the grain, the sharpening and the compression noise all land exactly where they were. Everything the tool invents is painted underneath it beforehand and never on top of it.

Which fill should I pick if I have no idea?

Blurred cover, nine times out of ten. It is the one every social platform trained people to expect, it has no structure in it for the eye to catch on, and it fails gently rather than strangely. Mirror beats it on foliage, water, gravel and crowds, where a reflection reads as more of the same thing. Edge stretch beats both on a plain sky or a studio backdrop. One flat colour beats all three when the picture is going into a document.

Can I put a photo of a person into a wide frame without it looking odd?

Usually, if you keep them away from the join. A face or a hand that touches the original edge is the hardest case there is: mirroring gives them a twin, stretching smears them sideways, and a blur puts a soft ghost of a face behind the sharp one. Nudge the photograph off centre with the arrow keys so the subject sits away from the seam, then use blur rather than mirror. If the result still argues with itself, the honest answer is that this frame was not the right shape for that photo.

Does the file I get out weigh more than the one I put in?

Almost always, because there are more pixels in it. A 9:16 photo taken to 16:9 has roughly three times the area, and even though the new part is soft and compresses well, the file still grows. The estimate in the Output panel updates every time you settle on something, so you can watch what a choice costs before you commit to it. If the number matters more than the shape, drop the quality slider a few points first — it moves the figure far more than the fill does.

Why does the tool ask before opening a very large photo?

Because the canvas it is about to build is larger still, and a browser tab that runs out of room does not fail politely — it hands back an empty rectangle or it closes. Past about 32 megapixels on a laptop, or 16 on an iPhone, we stop and offer to carry on with a lighter copy instead, with both choices weighted the same because neither one is wrong. The file on your device is never altered whichever you pick.

Every route on this site drives the same engine. What differs is how much has already been decided when you arrive: the front page starts neutral and waits for you to type a ratio, and the five others open with a target, a fill and a seam setting chosen for the job in their name. That saves three decisions on the way in and costs nothing, because every control is still sitting in the rail and every one of them still moves.

So pick by the sentence you would use to describe the job. “I have a still from a phone video and the slot is widescreen” is the 9:16 page. “This is tall and it has to be wide”, with no particular numbers attached, is portrait to landscape. “It has to be square and I am not cutting anybody’s feet off” is the square page. “I want the soft version everybody else posts” is blurred edges. “The printer asked for a border” is margins. If none of those is your sentence, stay here and type the ratio in.

What the route never changes is the arithmetic. How much of the finished frame gets built rather than photographed depends on your picture’s proportions and the target’s, and on nothing else — the door you came in by does not move that figure by a single pixel. Past about two thirds the fill has stopped decorating the picture and started being it, which is the point at which the choice in the fills guide matters more than the shape you asked for.