Put white space around a photograph

Adding a margin is the simplest thing this site does, and it is the same operation as every other page here wearing plainer clothes. The canvas grows; your photograph is placed inside it at its own size; the leftover area is painted. The only difference is that you are describing the leftover area directly — so many pixels on this side, so many on that — instead of naming a shape and letting the tool work out where the space has to go.

That directness is the point when the destination is a page rather than a platform. A photograph going into a document, onto a card, or through a printer that trims its own edges needs room around it that somebody decided on, not room that fell out of an aspect ratio.

Because you are setting the four edges yourself, the nine-point placement grid rests on this page — your numbers have already decided where the photograph sits. Everything else behaves as it does elsewhere: the fill is painted across the whole canvas first, your picture lands on top of it once, and the file is written from the same routine that drew what you were looking at.

The colour is worth a moment. Pure white is the obvious choice and the wrong one surprisingly often: a photograph with a warm cast or a scan with a cream paper tone sits oddly on true white, and the join reads as a mistake. The last swatch in the row is the average colour of your own photograph's outer edge, which usually looks like it was meant, and the hex field is there when a brand or a document has already decided for you.

Should I give the margin in pixels or in percent?

Percent, unless somebody handed you a pixel figure. A six percent margin looks the same on a twelve megapixel photo and on a screenshot, because it is measured against the photo it surrounds. Six hundred pixels is generous on one and swallows the other. The page opens on percent for that reason, and the toggle is directly above the four fields if you need the other.

Why are there four separate fields instead of one?

Because margins are not always even, and the commonest uneven case is a deliberate one: extra space along the bottom edge, so there is somewhere for a caption, a signature or a fold to sit. Set all four the same and you have a plain surround; set the bottom to twice the others and you have the layout a printed photograph has had for a century. The button under the fields copies the top value into the other three when even is what you want.

Does this give me a border?

It gives you space, which looks like a border and is not quite the same thing. There is no line, no inner keyline, no drop shadow and no frame treatment here — just more canvas in a colour you chose, with your photograph sitting in it. If what you want is a considered frame around the picture rather than room around it, that is a different job with different controls, and a tool built for it will serve you better than this one.

How much space does a 4x6 print need?

That depends on your printer rather than on us, and this page cannot answer it because it does not work in inches or centimetres — it works in the pixels your photograph is made of. What it can do is put an even band around the picture so that a print shop's own edge trimming has something to eat into other than your subject. Five to eight percent is the usual safe margin for that.