How can I prepare square photos for 4x6 or 5x7 printing without cropping?

Question

I have square images that I want to print through a lab that expects standard print sizes like 4x6 or 5x7. The lab’s web uploader automatically crops the photo to fill the paper, but I want the full square image preserved, centered on the print, with white space on the remaining area.

What’s a good way to batch-create new files at the correct aspect ratio for printing? I use Lightroom, but I’m open to other tools if they make this easier.

user1943 · Accepted Answer

ImageMagick! There's a bunch of recipes in the ImageMagick docs, but in short, something like:

convert input.jpg -background white -gravity center -extent 3000x2000 output.jpg

should do it.

To do a bunch in a loop, either wrap in a simple shell script, or if you don't care about preserving the original file names, just use a wildcard for input (*.jpg, say) and you'll get multiple numbered output files.

Match your height (above, 2000) to the actual height of your images, and the width to the corresponding width for the paper output ratio. If your images vary, you could read that from each image on the fly in your loop. There's very certainly some clever way to construct a clever single ImageMagick command line that does that, but I'd just go for a slightly longer bash script.

How can I prepare square photos for 4x6 or 5x7 printing without cropping?

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