Resize Your Resale Photos to a 1:1 Ratio Without Losing Part of Your Image

Many reselling platforms and resale apps require you to upload square images with a 1:1 ratio, however most stock photos, and even pics that you take with your phone’s camera, default to a 4:3 or 16:9 ratio – a vertical or horizontal rectangle. If you upload these to a reselling website like Poshmark, they will be cropped and you’ll end up losing part of your image, cutting off the top and bottom.

Did you know an alternative exists, which transforms your photo into a square image while keeping your entire photo intact? YES! With just a few clicks, using a free app, you can quickly and easily expand the sides of your photo to make it square (rather than cropping off the top and bottom) to turn it into a 1:1 ratio. This makes sure that your beautiful listing photos for Poshmark, Grailed, DePop, Mercari, or Tradesy stay intact, are consistently sized, and look incredible. Even if a particular site does not require a 1:1 photo ratio, you may still want to make them all square because:

• • If you’re using Instagram as a marketing tool to drive more sales to your resale listings or Poshmark closet, your listing photos will already perfectly fit Instagram’s 1:1 ratio square image post standard.
  • If you have a mix of different-sized photos on your listing, it can look a bit messy and distracting. Making them all square will ensure your listings look clean and consistent.

So how do you transform your photos into 1:1 ratio square photos easily, quickly, and for free? We will show you below, and there’s even a short video so that you can see how truly easy it is to convert your photos into square images without cropping them!

Use “YouCam Perfect” to Resize & Expand Your Photos

You can learn all about YouCam Perfect in our article about Photo Editing in the Genius Portal. For now, we’ll assume you already know the basics, and know how to download the YouCam mobile app. 

One of our favorite features of YouCam is the “Instasize” tool. This is the tool that you’ll use in the app, alone or combined with the “Removal” tool, in order to transform your standard 16:9 or 4:3 photo or stock image, into a perfectly square 1:1 ratio photograph, so that it can be uploaded to Poshmark or a similar resale app, without having to crop it, and without loosing the top and bottom of your image. 

This even works with different-colored backgrounds, backgrounds that have shadows, fading, and multiple colors, and even background that have details such as the edge of the floor, or certain patterns.  Of course if the background is plain white, this will be the easiest to transform, and you won’t even need to use the removal tool.

The tools inside YouCam are powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), so they work incredibly well and they’re simple too.

Please check out the short video below so you can see for yourself how simple this really is. In this “right-to-the-point” video we’re transforming a stock image of a Supreme Jersey, which features a background that is not plain; it has shadows and is lighter and darker in certain areas. The line where the floor meets the wall behind the model is also clearly visible.

Quick Guide: Step-by-step Directions for Transforming Photos into a Square 1:1 Ratio

1. Choose the Photo you’d like to edit
2. Go to the “Instasize” tool
3. Select the square Instagram icon (this one is normally selected by default if your starting image is not square already)
4. Two strips will appear on each side of your photo turning it into a square without losing any parts of the original image.
5. Now, select “color” from the menu towards the bottom, then select the “eyedropper” icon, and then move the cursor up, on top of the photo. The cursor will look like a target bullseye. Slowly move the target up and down along the edges of the original photo, to pick a color that will match the sides of the background the best. If your photo does not have a perfectly white background it may not look perfectly matched right now, but that’s ok.
6. Hit the ✓ to finish.
7. If your photo does have a plain white-background, it may look perfect at this point, so you can save the photo and exit. If not, continue with the steps below.
8. Scroll left to find the “removal tool” and select it.
9. Adjust the slider so that the size of your tool (the circle) is a bit bigger than the strip’s (sides) that were added to your photo in the earlier steps. 
10. Going from top to bottom in a straight line, cover the right strip completely, and very slightly overlap/cover the original background on the right side as well, then press the ✓. All the places you cover will appear “red” so that you can tell if you missed a spot.
11. The right side should now seamlessly blend into the background of the original photo. If the right side looks good, proceed to do the same thing on the left strip, on the left side of the photo, then press the ✓.
12. If something doesn’t look quite right when using the removal tool, just hit the undo button once to cancel the result, and once more, to get rid of the red coverings. Then, try step #10 again. Each time you re-do it, it will look slightly different due to the AI. You can do this as many times as you want . You’ll want to make sure the the photo now appears like it has one cohesive background, and that there are no strange smudges, marks, or lines that don’t connect. 
13. If it looks good and the background is blended seamlessly and it is expanded consistently across the whole photo, you are done and you can save your image! However, if certain areas still look strange, and you have already done step #12 multiple times, you can now move on to use a smaller-sized removal tool on the spots that you don’t like to fine tune them. You can make your circle smaller by adjusting the slider below it. Keep repeating this until the photo looks perfect.
14. You’re done!

If you’d like to see one more example, please watch the video below (it’s an even shorter video) showing the process again, but using a photo with a plain white background…

A Few Final Tips on Using “YouCam Perfect” to Transform & Resize Your Resale Listing Photos 

Add Background vs. a plain Color

If you are really having trouble using the removal tool, and can’t seem to get everything to look perfect, you can go back to the Instasize tool and play around with adding “Background” to the two new strips, rather than “Color.” I suggest you play with the various options to see how they impact the result.  When using “Background,” YouCam will insert a blurry image of the original photo to cover the two added strips. You can adjust the blurriness to be more focused and even move the orignal photo and the added background image around. Once you get it so that the least amount of the object or item in your photo is showing up on the added strips, hit ok and move on to step #8 above.  

Photos that do not have “white-space” around the item in the picture

When a model’s arm or a piece of the item in your original photo is jutting up to the edge of the orignal photo, with not much room, or that arm or piece of item is going clear off the edge of the photo (and is already cut-off), it is pretty difficult to resize. In these cases you may just be better off cropping the image to a square size. 

You can however, try this…when you are on step #5 above, but have not yet hit step #6, you can move the original photo around on top of the newly added strips. For example, let’s say one side of your original image has an arm going off the left edge of the pic. Since this is difficult to work with (as it’s hard for the app to just recreate the rest of the missing arm), you can instead move your original photo all the way to the left in this step, and then continue on working with just the right side. There will be more white space on the right side, but at least you can make the photo square without it looking strange.  You can always try the regular way first, and if it just doesn’t turn out the way you want, then you can try this instead.

What Else Can You Use The Instasize & Removal Tool For?

When we want to include a magazine article, blog post, or hyped launch announcement (which features the product we are selling) in one of our resale listings, we sometimes use the Instasize tool plus the Removal tool process along with the Add Photo tool on YouCam, to create a clean version of said article, blog post etc. We crop, resize, add image, use the removal tool, and then repeat, crop, resize, add image, use the removal tool, and so on, in order to showcase a modified cleaner version of that article in a new photo.  When you resize the photo using different standard sizes you can expand the working space of the photo, and then resize at the end back to square so you can fit more (or different) information on it. You will basically end up with a clean square image that you can add to your listing, with the magazines logo, a product image (usually the one in the article, but you could even swap out the image and use a different one), plus only the text that you want to show. You can remove all the text and junk that you don’t want to showcase, and can also remove things like the date, price, and the web address from the final image. 

For the Removal tool, there are literally endless uses. You can use it to remove the price or personal details from a tag or a receipt. You can use it to touch up a blemish on yourself if you are modelling something for your listing.  You can use it to remove things that accidently appear in your listing photos such as a cat’s tail, a shadow, a streak of light or smudge, a mess on your table, or dirty clothes in the corner of your room, or really anything that appears in your photo that you accidentally captured, that really shouldn’t be in your shot.

If you have any questions at all about these tools or how to use them, please add your comment below. We would love to hear from you, and would be thrilled to help!