How UncropPhoto works

The instant fills

When you drop a photo, it is placed in a larger canvas and the new border is built from the photo itself — no download, no waiting. There are four ways to build it, and you pick whichever suits the picture.

• Continue edge — the outermost row and column are stretched outward. Best on skies, walls and floors.
• Mirror — the scene is reflected across each edge. Best when the picture is roughly symmetrical.
• Blur backdrop — a soft, scaled copy of the whole photo sits behind it. The safe choice for busy pictures.
• Solid — a flat colour of your choosing, for print borders and logo backdrops.

The edge painter

When you want the scene continued rather than filled, the edge painter takes over. It is an inpainting neural network that downloads once from our model file server, then runs on your device — on WebGPU where your browser offers it, and on WebAssembly otherwise. The picture is covered in overlapping 512-pixel squares along the new border; each square holds real photo on one side and new space on the other, so the model always has something to continue. The squares are blended at their seams, and your original is drawn back on top pixel-exact.

It continues textures and shapes that run off the edge. It does not, and cannot, bring back a specific person or object that was cropped away — that information isn't in the file.

The file inspector

The recover tools do something different: they read, rather than build. A cropped file sometimes still carries the picture it was made from — an embedded preview that wasn't refreshed, or old bytes left after the file's end marker. The inspector reads those places and shows whatever decodes, labelled for what it is, and offers a clean copy that drops the leftovers and metadata. When there is nothing to find, it says so.

Why nothing is uploaded

A photo is read from the file you choose, worked on in the page, and written back to a download you ask for. There are no API routes and no server in this product. The only network request it ever makes is the one-way download of the edge model, and the privacy page lists it in full.