Add a border to an image

Six border styles: solid, polaroid, drop shadow, rounded, double line and film strip. Set the thickness in pixels or as a percentage of the frame.

Drop your files here

.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp · up to 50 MB

Choose files

How to Add Border

1
Add your image
JPG, PNG or WebP, up to 100 files at once. Photos taken on a phone are rotated upright first, so the border lands on the right sides.
2
Pick a style and a colour
Set the thickness in pixels or as a percentage of the shorter side, and decide whether the canvas should grow or stay the same size.
3
Click Add border and download
One file comes back on its own; several arrive as pulsarkit-bordered.zip.

Grow the canvas, or keep the original size

There are two ways to add a border and they suit different jobs. Growing the canvas keeps every pixel of the photo and makes the file bigger: a 2647 by 1489 image with a 20 pixel border becomes 2687 by 1529. That is what you want for printing or for a frame that must not eat into the composition. Keeping the original size scales the photo down and draws the border in the space you freed, so the file still measures exactly what it did before. That matters when a platform expects a specific pixel size, such as a 1080 by 1080 square for a feed post or a fixed banner slot, and a larger file would be re-cropped on upload. The toggle is called "Grow the canvas" and it is on by default.

What each style actually draws

Solid paints a band of your colour around the frame, optionally with rounded outer corners. Rounded masks the whole result to a rounded rectangle, so the corners become transparent rather than white. Double draws two lines of a third of the thickness each with a contrasting gap between them, the way a double mat is cut in framing. Drop shadow puts the photo on a transparent canvas and lays a blurred black copy underneath, offset down and to the right; the blur is a three-pass box blur rather than the canvas shadow property, because that property produces a visibly different radius in Chrome and in Safari. Polaroid uses the proportions of the real thing: side and top margins of six percent of the frame width, a bottom margin of eighteen percent, and an optional caption set in that bottom margin at forty percent of its height. Film strip adds black bars twelve percent of the frame height above and below, each with a row of rounded sprocket holes four percent of the frame width, spaced at eight percent, which gives twelve holes per bar on a standard landscape photo.

When the output becomes a PNG

Rounded corners and drop shadows both need transparency, and JPEG cannot store an alpha channel. Saving such a result as JPEG would fill every transparent pixel with black, which turns a tasteful rounded frame into a photo with four black triangles in the corners. So when the finished canvas contains any transparency the file is written as PNG instead, and the result card says so. This is decided by looking at the actual pixels, not by the style name. A solid border with a corner radius produces transparency too, and gets the same treatment.

Your photo stays in the browser

The image is decoded, framed and re-encoded on your own device using WebAssembly codecs. It is never uploaded, there is nothing to delete afterwards, and the EXIF block is not copied into the result. Camera model, timestamp and any GPS coordinates are dropped when the bordered file is written.

Frequently asked questions

Is my photo uploaded to a server?

No. Reading the file, decoding it, drawing the border and encoding it again all happen in this browser tab. There is no upload and no server-side copy.

Does adding a border change the size of the image?

By default yes: the canvas grows by twice the border thickness plus twice the padding on each axis, so the photo itself is untouched and the file gets larger. A 20 pixel border on a 2647 by 1489 photo gives 2687 by 1529.

How do I keep the original pixel size?

Turn off "Grow the canvas". The output measures exactly what the input did; the photo is scaled down to fit inside the border and centred. Use this when a platform expects an exact size and would otherwise re-crop your upload.

Why did my JPEG come back as a PNG?

Because the result has transparent pixels, and JPEG has no alpha channel. Rounded corners, drop shadows and a solid border with a corner radius all leave transparency in the corners; writing that as JPEG would fill it with black. The tool switches to PNG and tells you it did.

Can I put a caption under the photo?

Yes, with the Polaroid style. The caption goes in the wide bottom margin, centred, at forty percent of the margin height, and is trimmed to forty characters. It is drawn in the system sans-serif of whatever device is doing the work.

How many files can I frame at once?

Up to 100 files, 300 MB in total. All of them get the same style and settings, and the results come back as pulsarkit-bordered.zip. Percentage thickness is often the better choice for a batch, because it adapts to each photo's own dimensions.

What is the maximum border thickness?

200 pixels, or 25 percent of the shorter side. A border thicker than 45 percent of the shorter side is refused outright. At that point the photo is a stamp in the middle of a coloured rectangle, and the tool suggests the largest thickness that still leaves a picture.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. Solid, polaroid, rounded, double and film strip are essentially instant. Drop shadow costs more because of the blur: under a second on a typical photo, a few seconds on a very large one at maximum blur.