Adding white borders to photos to fit aspect ratio?

<p>Hi there, I wasn't sure where to post this so I hope this is the right place. I realize this may be a super trivial issue but I'm fairly new to photography so any help would be appreciated.<br>

So I upload my photos fairly often to instagram but they have an aspect ratio limit. For Landscape its 1.91:1 and for portrait its 4:5 anything wider or taller than that and it'll get cropped. The thing is, my photos rarely adhere to these aspect ratios and I often have to crop them in order for them to fit. So I'm thinking about adding a white border to these photos so that they adhere to the aspect ratio. This means I would have to add a border that has different sized horizontal/vertical margins. How would I go about doing this? Can I use GIMP or some other simple software to achieve this? I've found its not really possible to do this in lightroom. <br>

Thanks in advance! </p>

<p>Try to adjust (increase) the canvas size to meet the aspect ratio required. You may have to give the border a neutral colour so that the border appears as part of the image. I do this all the time when I send off my photos to be printed by a shop.<br>

One easy way is to increase the canvas significantly and then crop back to the ratio you want.</p>

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<p ><a href="/photodb/user?user_id=1180551">Jeff Owen</a><a href="/member-status-icons"><img title="Subscriber" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub10plus.gif" alt="" /></a>, Mar 01, 2016; 02:05 p.m.<br />Try to adjust (increase) the canvas size to meet the aspect ratio required. You may have to give the border a neutral colour so that the border appears as part of the image. I do this all the time when I send off my photos to be printed by a shop.<br />One easy way is to increase the canvas significantly and then crop back to the ratio you want.</p>

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<p>Sorry, which software do I use to do this? Thanks for your response. </p>

 

<p>That's Photoshop speak. There must be something similar in GIMP. In Photoshop, the image exists on a virtual piece of canvas (they start out the same size and 95% of the time, you dont mess w/ the canvas size but this would be one of the 5%'ers). You can modify the size of the canvas independently of the image size.</p>

<p>GIMP does it quite easily - just go to filters, decor, add border, check the size (width) each of the horizontal and vertical borders you wish to add, select the color, and hit ok. You'll then want to flatten your image. That's all there is to it. Takes less time to do than to read this explanation.</p>

<p>Irfanview does a great job on this. Open the picture, choose Image > change canvas size. Set the required canvas size + color, press ok and you're done. And the best thing: it's free.</p>

<p>I use Photoshop, but I am sure there are many others that can do similar work as others have mentioned.</p>

<p>Sorry to be late with this, but I've done this in Lightroom quite easily. Go to the Print module, and in the Cells menu, create a background in the aspect ratio(s) you need. Then simply drag your image onto the background and drag the corners to get the image size you want. Hope that helps.</p>