Margins for image PDFs: white space or edge to edge, chosen on purpose

Set the margin while converting

1. Drop the pictures and put them in order with Up and Down.
2. Pick a Paper, such as A4 or US Letter. A margin on a fixed paper makes a white frame around each picture.
3. Type the Margin in millimetres, from 0 to 50. It applies to all 4 sides.
4. Keep Fit so the whole picture shows inside the margin.
5. Click Make the PDF, then Download PDF.

What margins are for

Printers cannot reach the edge. Most desktop printers leave a strip unprinted on every side. Epson’s specification for its Stylus C82 inkjet, for example, gives minimum margins of 3 mm at the top, left and right and 14 mm at the bottom for single sheets (Epson Europe online guide, checked on 11 October 2026). A picture that runs to the page edge in the PDF loses those strips on paper, or the print dialog shrinks the whole page to fit. A margin of 10 mm puts the picture where every printer can reach it.

Hole punches eat paper. The ISO 838 standard for filing holes puts 6 mm holes with their centres 12 mm from the edge, so the holes reach 15 mm into the page (as summarised on Wikipedia’s “Hole punch” page, checked on 11 October 2026). A 20 mm margin keeps a picture clear of them.

Readers write on paper. A border gives room for a signature, a stamp or a note next to each photo, which is why a document photo looks more like a document with one.

Screens need none. On a phone or a monitor a margin is just white the viewer zooms past. Portals and screen-only PDFs read best at 0.

Which margin for which job

A margin shrinks the picture, it never crops it

With Fit, the picture is scaled to the space inside the margin and centred. More margin means a smaller picture, never a cut one. A portrait photo from a 12 megapixel phone (3024 by 4032 pixels) on A4:

All the pixels stay in the file whatever the margin; a smaller picture is simply drawn with more pixels per inch.

Two other settings meet the margin differently:

• Fill covers the whole space inside the margin and cuts off what sticks out. With a 10 mm margin on A4 that is about 9 % of a portrait photo; the frame stays white.
• Same as the picture has no paper to shrink into, so the margin is added around the picture and the page grows: a 1920 by 1080 screenshot with no resolution note is a 508 by 286 mm page at 0 mm and 528 by 306 mm at 10 mm.

The margin area is white, and so is the page behind a transparent PNG.

Fixing the margins of a finished PDF

To remove a white border, open the PDF in Crop PDF and pick Trim white margins. It finds what is drawn on each page and crops to it, leaving Keep around millimetres of white (3 by default; set 0 for edge to edge). Same size on keeps every page the same size. To take an exact amount off instead, pick By margins and type the Top, Right, Bottom and Left in millimetres.

To add breathing room, open it in Resize PDF, pick a Paper and type a Margin in millimetres. Each page is scaled down to fit inside the margin and centred, as a copy of the page rather than a new picture, so nothing is resampled.

What margins cannot do

• A 0 mm PDF does not make a borderless print. The printer’s own unprintable strip still applies; truly borderless prints need a printer with a borderless mode or a print shop.
• The converter has 1 margin for all 4 sides. There is no wider binding edge. Use 20 mm all round for filing, or crop the other sides afterwards with By margins.
• Crop PDF hides, it does not delete. Cropping changes the visible area of each page; what lies outside it is still in the file. That matters only when the cut-off part is private, as with a screenshot; there, crop the picture before converting.

Everything runs on your device; nothing is uploaded. For the paper itself, see A4, Letter or fit to image, and before you print, printing a PDF the right size.