Print photos at exactly the size you choose

Pick a photo size and a paper size. This fits as many copies as will physically fit, at true measured dimensions, and gives you a print-ready PDF.

Your photo never leaves your device

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Why photos print at the wrong size

Almost every "my photo printed too small" problem comes from the same confusion: pixels are not inches. A digital image has no physical size of its own. A 1500 x 2100 pixel photo is not 1500 anything — it is a grid of colour values. It acquires a physical size only when something decides how many of those pixels to lay down per inch of paper.

That number is DPI, dots per inch. At 300 DPI, 1500 pixels becomes 5 inches. At 150 DPI the same file becomes 10 inches. Nothing about the image changed; only the instruction to the printer did.

The trouble is that most printing paths never let you give that instruction. You send a JPEG to a printer dialog, and the driver scales it to fill the page or fit the margins — whichever it prefers. You get something photo-shaped at a size nobody chose. This is why the answer to "how do I print a 2 x 2 passport photo" is almost never found in the print dialog.

A PDF behaves differently. A PDF page has a declared physical size, and images placed on it have declared positions and dimensions in real units. Print that PDF at 100% scale and a 2 x 2 inch box measures 2 x 2 inches against a ruler. That is the whole trick here: rather than fighting your printer driver, this produces a document where the sizes are already fixed, and all the printer has to do is not resize it.

How many photos fit on a sheet

Every number below is computed by the same code that generates your PDF, so the table and the tool can never disagree.

The first number assumes safe margins at the paper edge and a thin gap to cut along — what an ordinary home printer can manage. A number in brackets is what fits with no margin at all, which needs a printer capable of true borderless printing, or a photo lab. Untick Safe margins in the tool to use it.

Note how much that second number can matter: 2 x 2 inch photos on 4 x 6 paper go from two to six, because 2 + 2 is exactly 4 and even a sixteenth of an inch of margin costs you an entire column.

Printing it so the size is actually right

1. Print at 100%, not "fit to page"

This is the step that undoes all the others. In Adobe Reader the setting is Page Sizing, and you want Actual size — not Fit, not Shrink oversized pages. In Chrome's print dialog, open More settings and set Scale to 100; the Default option often means 94% or 97%. If your PDF viewer offers no scale control at all, open the file in a different viewer rather than accepting whatever it decides.

2. Tell the printer the real paper size

If you are printing on 4 x 6 photo paper, the printer must be set to 4 x 6 — not Letter, not A4. A printer configured for Letter and fed a small sheet will scale, rotate or misfeed it.

3. Check with a ruler before you cut

Print one sheet on plain paper first and measure a photo. If it measures 2.4 inches where it should be 2.5, the scale setting is still not at 100%. Photo paper is expensive; plain paper is not.

4. Cut along the guides

The thin corner marks sit just outside each photo, so a straight cut along them leaves no visible line on the finished print. A craft knife against a metal ruler gives a far cleaner edge than scissors.

Common questions