Polaroid-Style Photo Maker

Instant-film frames make ordinary photos look like keepsakes — for invitations, scrapbooks, social posts, wedding signs and photo walls. This tool crops each photo to the square picture of a classic instant print, puts it on a card with the familiar wide bottom border, and lets you write a handwritten-style caption, tilt the card and add a soft shadow. It works in your browser on a whole batch at once.

How to use this tool

1. Drop one or more photos.
2. Choose the picture shape and which part to keep when cropping (centre, top for faces, or bottom).
3. Type an optional caption and pick the frame colour; tilt the card or add a shadow if you like.
4. Save as PNG (transparent around a tilted card) or JPG and download.

Formula

Side and top borders = picture width × 4.5 ÷ 79; bottom border = picture width × 23.5 ÷ 79. Card = (picture width + 2 × side) × (picture height + side + bottom).

These are the proportions of classic square instant film, a 79 × 79 mm picture on an 88 × 107 mm card, with equal side and top borders. For the 4:3 and original shapes the same border widths are used, measured from the picture width. A tilted card is drawn on a larger transparent canvas: width = card width × cos θ + card height × sin θ (plus a margin for the shadow).

Example

A photo cropped to 1000 × 1000 px gets side and top borders of 1000 × 4.5 ÷ 79 = 57 px and a bottom border of 1000 × 23.5 ÷ 79 = 297 px, so the card is 1114 × 1354 px — the same 88 : 107 shape as the real print. A 7% caption is set at 1114 × 0.07 ≈ 78 px.