What it fills well
The edge painter continues what's already running off the edge. It is at its best where the border is a continuation of something plain:
- Sky, walls, grass, water, roads and blurred backgrounds.
- A thin border lost to a tight crop or a scanned edge.
- Reaching a camera or social shape (4:3, 16:9, 1:1, 4:5) without cutting.
Where it starts guessing
The further from the original edge you ask it to reach, the more of the result is invented:
- Up to about a third more canvas: reliable on open scenes.
- Around double the size: fine as a backdrop, but expect invented detail.
- Beyond double: most of the frame is the model's guess, not the real missing scene.
What no uncrop can do
A person, a sign, an object that was cropped out cannot be recovered by any uncrop tool — those pixels were discarded when the photo was cropped, so there is nothing to rebuild. If you need the actual original and not a plausible continuation, the file inspector reads what the file itself still carries.
Questions
Does my photo get uploaded?
No. The picture is read, grown and encoded by code running in this browser tab. It is never sent to a server — there is no server to send it to. The only download that ever happens is the optional edge-painter model, which travels one way, from our model file server to you.
Why can't AI bring back what was cropped?
Because the information is gone. Cropping deletes the pixels outside the frame; a model can invent a plausible continuation, but it cannot know what was actually there. Any tool claiming otherwise is showing you a guess.
So what is the AI actually doing?
Continuing the texture and shapes that run off the edge — a wall keeps going, a sky stays a sky. It's genuinely useful for backgrounds and backdrops, and honest about being a continuation.
When should I use the file inspector instead?
When you want the real original rather than a continuation. If the cropped file still carries a preview or leftover data, the inspector can show it; the edge painter never can.