ALL IMAGE TOOLS56
Add Border to Image
Add a Border to an Image — Any Colour, Any Edge
Paint a solid frame around a picture: one width on every edge, or a different width per edge.
About Add Border to Image
A border here is pure addition. The canvas is made larger than your picture, filled with the colour you choose, and your image is drawn whole inside it — nothing is cropped, nothing is scaled, and every pixel of the original is still an original pixel. Because the arithmetic is the one thing you cannot check by eye, the page writes it out: an 800 × 600 photo with 20 pixels on every edge becomes 840 × 640, and that line updates as you type. The edges start linked, so a single number frames the whole picture; break the link and Top, Right, Bottom and Left each take their own width, which is what a caption strip or an off-centre matte needs. The colour is a six-digit hex, typed or picked from the swatch. Output can be PNG, JPG or WebP and starts on the format you brought. The image is decoded, redrawn and re-encoded, so EXIF and GPS are not carried through and colour is written as sRGB. Everything runs in this tab; no file is uploaded.
Questions
How much bigger does the image get?
Exactly the sum of the edges, and the page shows the sum before you run it. An 800 × 600 picture with 20 pixels on every edge becomes 840 × 640: the width gains left plus right, the height gains top plus bottom. Nothing is resampled, so the picture inside the frame is the same size it always was.
Can each edge have a different width?
Yes. The edges start linked so one number frames the whole picture. Click the chain-link button under BORDER and the single All edges field becomes four — Top, Right, Bottom and Left — each with its own width. That is how you build a caption strip along the bottom or an off-centre matte for printing.
Can the border be transparent?
No. The frame is filled with the six-digit hex colour you choose, so it is always painted. A transparent margin is a different operation from painting one, and this tool does not offer it rather than pretending a white fill is the same thing.
Does adding a border crop or shrink my picture?
Neither. The canvas is enlarged and your image is drawn into it whole at its original size, so the border is added around the picture rather than over it. If you want the frame to eat into the edges instead, crop first and then add the border.
Which output format should I pick for a bordered image?
The page starts on whatever you dropped. PNG re-encodes losslessly and keeps any transparency inside the picture, but a photo written as PNG can be much larger than the JPEG you started with. JPG is smaller and cannot store an alpha channel, so anything transparent is painted white on the way out. WebP usually lands smallest.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. Transmute processes everything locally in your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your files never leave your device — there is no server, no upload, no cloud processing.