About this site

Everything on this site follows from a single sentence, and it is worth stating before anything else, because it is also the reason several obvious-looking features are missing.

Nothing here resamples the original photograph.

Your picture is copied into a larger grid at its own size, on whole-number coordinates, with interpolation switched off for that one draw. It is not scaled up, scaled down, sharpened or re-encoded on the way in. Whatever the camera recorded is what comes out the other end, surrounded by more canvas than it started with.

That rule is what separates this from the half-dozen other things that sound like it. Making a photo physically larger is a different operation with different mathematics behind it. Reaching a shape by cutting is the opposite operation. Putting a measured frame around a picture for presentation is a third. All three are useful; none of them is what happens here.

Because the job has a specific shape and general-purpose editors handle it badly. Open a photo in most software, ask for a wider canvas, and you get an empty region with a checkerboard in it and no opinion about what belongs there. The interesting part of this problem is not growing the rectangle — that takes one line of code — it is deciding what the new region should contain, and being honest about which of those decisions holds up.

So the fills are the product. Five of them, each one arithmetic on pixels you already have: reflected, smeared, blurred, flattened, swept. Each one is written up beside the control that selects it, with the subject matter it flatters and the subject matter it wrecks, because a fill chosen blind is a coin toss and a fill chosen knowingly is a decision.

There is no generated fill on this site, and the button is absent rather than greyed out. A model small enough to run inside a browser tab is a download of several hundred megabytes that mobile browsers discard at will, needs graphics support a large share of phones do not have, takes the better part of a minute for one pass, and still fails visibly on straight lines, repeating patterns, lettering and faces. We would rather ship five things that take milliseconds on every device than one that works sometimes.

If that changes — if the models get small enough and the support gets wide enough — it will appear here as an experiment, labelled as one, with the wait time and the failure modes written on the same screen. Until then, the honest description of this tool is that it rearranges your own photograph very carefully around itself.

ExpandPictures is part of a small group of single-purpose photo tools, each built around one job rather than a menu of them. It is free, it is laid out to carry advertising below the working surface once the domain is approved for it — none is being served there today — and it has no account, no queue and no storage. There is no server behind the page that could hold a photograph even if somebody asked it to.