Make a photo square without cropping

A square is a shape plenty of feeds and profile slots still insist on, and the one most often reached by sacrifice. Crop a tall photograph to 1:1 and you lose a third of its height, which is usually somebody's legs or somebody's hair. This page does the opposite: the long edge stays exactly as long as it was, and the short edge grows to meet it.

Because the target is only ever as big as the dimension you already have, a square asks less of the fill than any other conversion here. On a phone portrait it builds two bands of a few hundred pixels each rather than two thirds of the frame, and a mirror across that distance is short enough to read as texture rather than as a reflection — which is why this route opens on one.

The seam softening slider is the control worth understanding on this page. A mirrored edge has no jump in colour at the join, but it does have a sudden change in direction: everything that was travelling one way is now travelling the other, and the eye finds that kink immediately. The slider blurs a narrow band across the join and fades it out both ways, so the direction changes gradually instead of instantly.

It does not touch your photograph. The band is softened, then your picture is drawn back over the top at full sharpness, so the effect lands entirely on the side of the join that was invented. Sixteen pixels is the starting point here; above about forty the softening starts to be visible as softening, which is its own kind of tell.