How to Take a Photo Strip in Four Steps
Ninety seconds, start to finish. Less if you already know which face you are pulling.
1. Pick a layout. The four cut strip is loaded by default because it is what most people picture when they say photobooth. Want a square grid for nine friends? A single polaroid for one good shot? A filmstrip with sprocket holes down the sides? A 4x6 postcard where one photo is six times the size of the others? One click, sixteen to choose from. Anything you have already shot carries straight over.
2. Fill the frames. Hit Start camera, then Shoot frame 1. The shutter fires the moment you press it and the selection walks on to the next empty frame, so four presses gets you four photos at whatever pace you like. Your frames sit in a rail directly under the camera, so each one appears where you are already looking. Want the hands off version? Shoot all counts you down through every frame in turn, exactly like the machine at the mall. Got a photo on your laptop that belongs in frame three? Tap frame three and pick Device. Drag the file straight onto the booth. Paste it with Ctrl+V. Landed a shot in the wrong frame? Drag the card to the position you want it in and the rest shift along to make room. When the last frame fills, the camera closes itself and the page carries you on to the design step.
3. Set the look. Start on the Frame tab, since the paper decides how much room everything else gets. Cut every photo to a heart, a circle or an arch. Stretch the strip taller or wider, float it on a colour, rotate it a few degrees and write a caption in the space under the photos. Then move to Filters: twelve of them, from clean black and white to a blown out Y2K fade, plus grain, vignette and light leak sliders that push it until it looks like it came out of a machine rather than a browser. Extras carry the date stamp, the stickers, your own frame and your own logo.
4. Download or print. PNG for screens, a 600 by 1800 file for a real 2x6 paper strip, an 1800 by 1200 file for a 4x6 postcard, a 4x6 sheet carrying two strips for cutting, a Story sized image or a looping boomerang GIF.
Nothing leaves your device at any point. Everything is processed here itself, nothing is uploaded to our servers.
What This Booth Does That the Others Do Not
There are a lot of browser photobooths now. Most of them do the same four things: open the camera, count to three, stack the shots and hand you a PNG. That is fine until you actually try to use the result for something.
Filters That Survive the Download
Here is the dirty secret of browser photobooths. Most of them apply filters as a display effect, the same way a website tints a background image. It looks great in the preview. Then Safari, which has never supported baking that effect into a canvas export, hands you a flat unfiltered file.
That is not a small audience to break for. It is most of the iPhone users who make up the bulk of everyone shooting photo strips.
Every filter in this booth is arithmetic done on the pixels themselves. Contrast curve, saturation, split toning, grain, vignette, all calculated one pixel at a time, identically in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. What you see in the preview is what lands in your downloads folder. Test it on an iPhone if you like. We would rather you did.
A Retake Button for One Frame, Not the Whole Session
You blinked on frame two. Everywhere else, that means shooting all four again and hoping you do not blink on a different one this time.
Every frame here has its own Reshoot button. Fix the one that went wrong, keep the three that went right, move on with your life.
One Strip, Two Sources
Every other booth makes you choose a lane. Camera mode or upload mode, pick one at the start and live with it.
Real sessions are messier than that. Your friend is on a video call and you want their screenshot in frame four. Three of you are together and the fourth is in another country, so their selfie goes in the last slot. You shot a great strip but one frame would be better with a photo from last week.
So every slot here carries both buttons at once. The camera keeps streaming while you open files. Shoot, load, swap, reshoot, in any order, as many times as you want. Nothing resets.
Print Files at the Size a Real Booth Prints
Ask any photobooth site for a print file and it will proudly hand you something around 1080 pixels wide and call it high resolution. Take that to a print shop and it comes back soft, because a paper strip needs 300 pixels for every printed inch.
A booth strip is two inches by six. Two hundred years of print convention says 300 DPI, so the file needs to be 600 by 1800 pixels. That is exactly what the 2x6 button produces. The 4x6 button goes further and builds a 1200 by 1800 sheet with two identical strips side by side, which is how the machine at the mall has always worked so both of you get one.
A Frame You Can Bring Yourself
Bride and groom names down the footer. A conference logo. A birthday number. Design a transparent PNG at the exact pixel size the tool shows next to the preview, upload it and it locks over the whole strip with your photos showing through the holes.
It turns a free browser toy into something you can put on a table at a wedding without anyone knowing you did not pay a rental company for it.
A Logo That Lands Where You Put It
Separate layer, separate job. Where the frame wraps the whole composition, the logo is a small mark that sits on top. Corner presets get it roughly there, then drag it on the preview to place it exactly. Pull the opacity down if you want it to whisper rather than shout.
Cafes running a promo, salons, market stalls and photographers handing out strips at an event all want this and almost none of the free tools offer it.
What Each Shape Is Good For
The layout decides more than the outline. It decides how many chances you get and how much of each photo survives the crop.
The Classic, Four Frames Deep
Four photos stacked on a tall thin strip. This is the format Korean self photo studios turned into a worldwide habit. It is the one most people mean by photobooth. It fills a 2x6 paper strip edge to edge with nothing to trim.
Four frames is the sweet spot for a reason. One serious, one silly, one where somebody ruins it and one where you are all laughing at the person who ruined it. That is the script. It works every time.
Two and Three Frame Strips
Fewer frames, bigger photos. A three cut suits a couple who want each shot readable from across a fridge door. A two cut is the honest choice when you know full well you only have two good poses in you.
Both still fill a 2x6 strip exactly. They just spend the paper differently, the three cut going square and the two cut going portrait.
The Six Cut, When Four Frames Are Not Enough
Six frames on the same 2x6 paper, which means each one goes letterbox wide. It is the greedy option. You get six goes at a face instead of four. You pay for it in height, so nobody in the shot can be standing up.
Shoot it seated, shoulders in. Treat it like a contact sheet rather than a portrait. Six narrow frames of the same pose looks like a mistake. Six narrow frames of a story does not.
Grids Built for Groups
Square cells. The 2 by 2 for four shots, the 2 by 3 for six, the 2 by 4 for eight and the 3 by 3 for nine. Square crops fit groups better than a strip cell does because you keep the width for shoulders instead of trimming everyone at the edges.
Nine frames is a lot of shooting. Set the timer to five seconds and give everyone room to shuffle between shots. The 3 by 3 has a second life as a feed grid, since nine squares is exactly what three rows of an Instagram profile hold.
Polaroids, Single and Double
One square photo, thin border on three sides, a fat white slab at the bottom. That bottom slab is the whole point, so write on it. Names, a date, an inside joke that will not make sense in a year.
The double lays two of them side by side and lands on a 4x6 card, which is the cheapest print any lab sells. Two polaroids, one order, one photo you can actually hold.
Filmstrip and Wide Formats
The vertical filmstrip runs sprocket holes down both margins for people who want their strip to look like it came off a roll of 35mm. Turn the film on its side and the holes go with it, along the top and the bottom, which is what a real negative looks like lying on a light table. The wide strip is the same four across shape without the perforations. It is the one that fits a header image or a laptop sticker.
Cards That Fill a 4x6 Print
Rental booths print two things: a 2x6 strip or a 4x6 card. Everything above is the strip half of that. Postcard puts four landscape frames in a 2 by 2 on a card, which is the format most wedding booths hand out.
Then there are the two layouts nobody else online bothers with, the ones where the frames are not all the same size. Hero Four gives frame 1 the full width and two rows of height, then lines frames 2, 3 and 4 up underneath it. Card Collage stands one large frame beside two stacked ones. Both exist because a strip of four equal photos treats your best shot exactly the same as the one where somebody blinked. Sometimes you want to be less democratic than that.
Shoot the big frame first. Frame 1 is always the large one, so the booth asks for it before anything else.
Getting the Camera to Behave
Browser cameras fail in a handful of predictable ways. Here is each of them with the actual fix, instead of a shrug.
When the Browser Never Asks for Permission
If no prompt appears at all, you almost certainly denied it once before on this site and the browser remembered. Click the padlock or the camera icon in the address bar, set camera to Allow, then reload.
On iPhone, Settings then Safari then Camera has a per-site override that quietly overrules the page. On Android, Chrome keeps the same setting under Site settings.
When the Preview Stays Black
A black rectangle where your face should be usually means another program already grabbed the camera and will not share it. Zoom, Teams, Discord, OBS and a forgotten second browser tab are the usual culprits. Quit them all, then reload.
On a laptop, check the physical privacy shutter too. Everyone has debugged a camera for ten minutes before noticing the slider was closed. Everyone.
Why Your Handwriting Comes Out Backwards
Mirror mode is on by default, because a selfie camera that does not mirror feels deeply wrong to almost everybody. The cost is that any text in frame reverses.
Holding up a sign, a card or a book cover? Switch Mirror off first. Your face will look slightly unfamiliar for a second, which is simply what you actually look like to everyone else. The writing will read correctly.
Picking the Right Lens on a Phone
When more than one camera exists, a lens dropdown appears. On a phone that lets you jump from the front camera to the far better rear camera, which is worth doing for group shots where somebody else is holding the phone.
On a desktop with a plugged in webcam, the same dropdown lets you skip the built in laptop camera, which is nearly always the worse of the two.
Lighting a Booth Shot Without a Ring Light
Photobooth machines cheat. There is a bank of lights right in front of your face, at eye level, diffused through white plastic. That is the entire secret of why booth photos look better than the ones you take at home.
You can copy it with things you already own. Sit facing a window, never with your back to it. Let daylight do the work. After dark, put a lamp behind the screen and point it at your face rather than at the wall. Cover the shade with a white pillowcase and you have made a softbox for free.
If none of that is available, turn Flash on and go fullscreen. The screen goes white at the moment of capture, which throws a surprising amount of soft light forward in a dark room. It will never match a window. It comfortably beats a ceiling light directly overhead, which carves shadows under everyone's eyes and makes a group of healthy twenty year olds look like a police lineup.
Posing for a Four Frame Strip
Four frames go by faster than you expect. Deciding what to do in the two seconds between them is how strips end up with four nearly identical awkward smiles.
A Pose Script That Works Every Time
Agree on the order before you start. Frame one, straight faces, look right down the lens. Frame two, the classic, whatever your group considers the classic. Frame three, everyone does something different at the same time. Frame four, laugh at frame three.
That last one is the keeper, every single time. The genuine laugh in frame four is why the format has survived a hundred years.
A few reliable moves for the middle frames: the Y2K sunglasses and peace sign, half covering your face. The finger heart that K-pop exported to the entire planet. Cheek squish. Everyone looking sharply off camera at the same imaginary thing. Someone pretending to leave the frame.
Poses That Photograph Badly
Anything requiring a prop you have to pick up mid session, because the timer will catch you reaching for it. Anything where two people plan to do the same gesture, since one of you will be half a beat late and it reads as a mistake. Leaning back, which a wide lens turns into a very unflattering study of your chin.
Lean slightly forward instead. Chin marginally down, eyes up. It feels ridiculous. It photographs beautifully.
What Each Filter Is Actually For
Twelve filters is not twelve variations on sepia. Each one is doing a specific job.
| Filter | What it does | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|
| Original | Nothing at all | The light was already good |
| Black & White | Clean luminance mono | Mixed or ugly colour casts in the room |
| Noir | Mono with crushed blacks and grain | You want drama, not documentation |
| Vintage | Warm paper tone, lifted blacks, desaturated | Going for something that looks found in a drawer |
| Film Grain | Contrast plus heavy grain, cool shadows | Imitating pushed 400 speed colour film |
| Y2K Fade | Blown highlights, cyan shadows, low contrast | The early 2000s digital camera look |
| Golden Hour | Strong warm shift with a highlight glow | Shooting at midday and wishing you were not |
| Cinematic | Teal shadows against orange highlights | Skin tones need to pop off a cool background |
| 90s Disposable | Flat contrast, magenta cast, visible grain | Deliberately imperfect party photos |
| Soft | Low contrast, gentle warmth | Harsh light is being unkind to skin |
| Cool | Blue shift across the frame | Warm indoor bulbs made everything orange |
| Warm | Amber shift across the frame | Daylight or a screen made everything blue |
The three sliders underneath work on top of any of them. Grain adds texture that hides digital smoothness. Vignette darkens the corners and pulls the eye to the middle. Light leak drags a warm orange bloom in from the top right, imitating a film door that never sealed properly. Used at ten to twenty percent they add character. Pushed to the ceiling they turn your friends into a lens flare, which is occasionally the point.
Printing Your Strips at Home or at a Shop
A photo strip on a screen is a photo. A photo strip on paper, stuck to a fridge or tucked in a wallet, is the reason the format exists. This is the part nearly every free photobooth site skips entirely.
Print Sizes That Actually Exist
| Output | Pixels | Paper | Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2x6 strip | 600 × 1800 | 2 by 6 inches at 300 DPI | The classic booth strip |
| 4x6 card | 1800 × 1200 | 6 by 4 inches at 300 DPI | Postcard layouts, nothing to cut |
| 4x6 sheet | 1200 × 1800 | 4 by 6 inches at 300 DPI | Two strips to cut apart |
| Screen PNG | Around 1400 wide | None | Posting and messaging |
| Story | 1080 × 1920 | None | Instagram Stories and Reels covers |
The Story export deliberately leaves roughly 250 pixels clear at the top and bottom. Instagram parks the progress bar, your username and the reply box in those strips, so artwork that runs edge to edge gets its corners eaten. Everything important stays in the middle.
Two Keepsakes From One Ordinary Print
Photo labs do not have a 2x6 button in most of their ordering flows. They absolutely have a 4x6 button, because 4x6 is the most printed photograph size in history.
So the 4x6 sheet export places two identical strips side by side on one standard print. Order it anywhere, collect it, then cut once down the centre line. Use a guillotine or a steel ruler and a fresh blade. Scissors wander. A strip with a wobbly edge looks homemade in the bad way.
The postcard layouts skip the cutting entirely. Pick Postcard, Hero Four, Card Collage or the double polaroid and the 4x6 card button writes a landscape file that fills the same ordinary print on its own. Same paper, same price, no blade.
Paper, Ink and What Fades
A real booth uses a dye sublimation printer, which fuses dye into a coated surface and produces prints that resist smudging, moisture and fading. That is why a strip from a mall booth still looks fine years later at the bottom of a drawer.
Home printing splits into two camps. Dye based inkjet ink, which most cheap printers use, is the fastest to fade, especially anywhere sunlight lands. Pigment based ink lasts dramatically longer and is worth seeking out if the strip is going on a wall rather than in a box.
Whichever you use, print on actual photo paper rather than copier paper. Glossy for punch, matte if the strip is going behind glass where reflections would fight you.
Running a Photo Booth at a Party
Photobooth rentals run into the hundreds for an evening. A tablet, a lamp and a printed card do most of the same job for the cost of the card.
Setting Up the Scan Code
Open Party mode in the Extras tab, print the scan card and put it where people queue for drinks. Guests scan it with their phone camera, land on this page and shoot their own strip on their own device. Everything stays on their phone, they keep the file instantly and nobody waits for a printer.
Print several cards. One on each table beats one by the door that everyone walks past.
Propping Up a Phone or a Laptop
If you would rather run one shared device, a laptop on a stack of books at chest height works better than anything at eye level, because a slightly low angle gets whole groups in frame. Angle the screen so people can see themselves. That single detail is the difference between a booth people use and a booth people avoid.
Hang a plain sheet, a curtain or a roll of wrapping paper behind the shooting spot. A cluttered background is what makes home photobooth shots look like home photobooth shots.
What Goes Wrong at Events
Venue wifi collapses under a hundred guests. That is fine here, because once this page has loaded the shooting, filtering and downloading all happen on the device with no further network use at all. Load the page before the room fills up and it keeps working when the wifi does not.
The other reliable failure is battery. A phone running a camera preview for three hours will die. Keep a power bank on the table.
Where the Four Cut Strip Came From
The format is a century old. Anatol Josepho, a Siberian immigrant to New York, opened the first automated Photomaton booth at 1659 Broadway in September 1925. A quarter bought a strip of eight photographs delivered in eight minutes. Queues hit 7,500 people a day and 280,000 people had used it within six months. Josepho sold the invention for a million dollars in 1927.
The current wave came from Korea. Life4Cuts opened its first self photo studio in Daegu in 2017, the four frame strip became the thing an entire generation did after dinner. The brand name turned into shorthand for the whole category the way hoover did for vacuum cleaners.
A hundred years apart, the same idea. Four frames, a countdown, no photographer and a strip of paper you keep.
A Browser Booth Against a Rented Booth
| This booth | A rented booth | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Nothing | Hundreds for an evening |
| Setup | A printed card on a table | Delivery, assembly, an attendant |
| Capacity | Everyone at once, on their own phones | One group at a time, in a queue |
| Prints | You print later, at any lab | Instant paper strips on the night |
| Lighting | Whatever you arrange | Professional and consistent |
| Props | Bring your own | Usually included |
Be honest about the trade. A rented booth wins on instant paper and on lighting you do not have to think about. A browser booth wins on cost, on throughput and on the fact that nobody stands in a queue. For a wedding with a budget, hire the booth. For a birthday, a graduation, an office party or a Tuesday, this does the job and the strips look the same on Instagram either way.
Where This Sits Next to Our Other Tools
A photo strip is often the start of a longer job, so here is the rest of the kit.
Need the strip at a specific pixel size or under a file size limit? The Image Resizer handles pixels, percentages, platform presets and exact KB targets. Putting two strips next to each other for a before and after? The Side by Side Photo Maker adds labels and a divider. Combining several strips into one frame is a job for Merge Images.
Posting to Instagram? The Instagram Grid Maker slices an image into profile grid tiles. The Instagram Carousel Splitter turns a wide image into swipeable slides. Every one of them runs in your browser exactly like this booth and the full set is listed here.
For layouts, filters and collage templates on your phone, CollagePhotoApp is free on iOS and Android. If you are planning content rather than shooting it, the Instagram story maker roundup and the guide to adding multiple photos to an Instagram Story are the best places to start on the blog.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this photobooth really free?
Yes. Unlimited strips, unlimited sessions, no account and no watermark. The work happens on your own device rather than on a rented server, so there is no bill to pass on and nothing to meter.
Do my photos get uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything is processed here itself, nothing is uploaded to our servers. The camera feed goes straight into the page, the strip gets built on your device and the file lands in your downloads folder. None of it crosses the internet.
Do I need to install an app or create an account?
Neither. Open the page, allow the camera and shoot. There is no sign-up wall, no email box and no free trial that expires. Closing the tab is the whole exit process.
Does the strip come out with a watermark?
Never. What downloads is your strip, your frame colour and whatever you decorated it with. No logo in the corner, no badge across the footer and no upgrade prompt sitting on top of the picture.
Can I build a strip from photos I already have instead of using the camera?
Yes. The file path gets exactly the same treatment as the camera path. Tap any empty frame and it asks whether the photo comes from the camera or from this device. You can also press Select from PC on a frame card, use the Pick from Device button under the camera, drag files onto the booth panel or paste an image with Ctrl+V. Filters, layouts, frames and print exports all behave identically.
Can I mix camera shots and saved photos in the same strip?
Yes, frame by frame. Every card carries its own Shoot button and its own Select from PC button. The camera keeps running while you pick files. Shoot frames one, two and four, then drop a photo from your downloads folder into frame three. Swapping a shot frame for a file does not reset the session. Neither does reshooting a file frame.
Why will the camera not start?
Three usual suspects. The browser permission prompt got dismissed at some point, so check the padlock in the address bar and set camera to allow. Another tab or app already holds the camera, so close it and reload. Or the page is loading over plain HTTP, which browsers refuse to grant camera access on at all.
Why does the camera fail inside the Instagram or TikTok browser?
Those apps open links in an embedded browser view rather than in Safari or Chrome. Camera access inside those views is restricted. Tap the three dots and choose Open in browser. Pasting the link into Safari or Chrome works too. The photo upload path works even in the embedded view.
Can I retake just one bad frame?
Yes. Every frame in the rail has its own Reshoot button, so the one where you blinked gets redone while the other three stay untouched. Most photobooth sites make you restart the entire session for one bad frame.
What layouts can I choose?
Sixteen. Four paper strips that print at 2x6, which are the classic 1 by 4, a three cut, a two cut and a letterboxed six cut. Four square grids at 2 by 2, 2 by 3, 2 by 4 and 3 by 3. A single polaroid and a double polaroid. Two filmstrips, one with the sprocket holes down the sides and one with them along the top and bottom. A wide four across strip. Then three that fill a 4x6 postcard, which are a 2 by 2 card, a hero card with one big frame over three small ones and a collage card with one big frame beside two stacked. Switching between them keeps every photo you have already taken.
Which layout has one big photo and three small ones?
Hero Four. Frame 1 spans the full width of the card and frames 2, 3 and 4 sit in a row underneath it, so your best shot gets roughly six times the area of the others. Card Collage is the same idea turned sideways, with one large frame beside two stacked ones. Both land on a 4x6 postcard exactly. Shoot the big frame first, since that is the one people will actually look at.
Does the filter apply on an iPhone as well as on a laptop?
Yes, on every browser including Safari on iPhone. Each filter is calculated pixel by pixel rather than layered on with a display effect, so the file you download is the picture you were looking at. Plenty of booth sites apply a display-only filter and hand you a flat, unfiltered file on iOS.
What size should I print a photo strip?
Two inches by six inches is the size booths have printed for decades. At 300 DPI that is 600 by 1800 pixels, which is exactly what the 2x6 print button gives you. Keep that file at its native size and let the lab print it at 2x6 rather than scaling it up.
How do I get two strips out of one 4x6 print?
Use the 4x6 sheet button. It builds a 1200 by 1800 pixel file carrying two identical strips side by side, orders it as a standard 4x6 print anywhere, then you cut down the middle with a guillotine or a steel ruler. One print, two strips, one for each of you.
Can I print a 4x6 postcard instead of a strip?
Yes. Pick Postcard, Hero Four, Card Collage or Duo Polaroid and a 4x6 card button appears beside the download. It writes 1800 by 1200 pixels, which is a landscape 4x6 at a true 300 DPI. The layout is built to fill that shape with nothing left to trim. Photo booth rental companies print either a 2x6 strip or a 4x6 card. The card is the one weddings and corporate parties tend to ask for.
Can I print these at a photo shop?
Yes. Any lab that takes a 4x6 order will print the 4x6 sheet without questions, since it is a completely ordinary print size. Some labs also offer a 2x6 strip product directly. Upload the file at full size and switch off any auto crop or auto enhance option the ordering page offers.
Why does my writing come out backwards?
Because mirror mode is on, which flips the image so the preview matches what you see in a mirror. That feels natural for faces and breaks completely for text. Hold up a birthday card or a sign, turn mirror off first, then shoot.
What does the mirror toggle actually do?
It flips the frame left to right. On means you see yourself the way a bathroom mirror shows you, which is what almost everyone expects from a selfie camera. Off means you see yourself the way other people see you, which is the correct setting for signs, logos and lettering.
Can I put my own frame or logo on the strip?
Both. They are separate layers. A custom frame is a transparent PNG that covers the whole strip with your photos showing through its holes, built at the pixel size shown next to the preview. A logo is a small mark you drag anywhere on the composition with its own size and opacity sliders. Weddings usually want the frame, small businesses usually want the logo.
How do I make the boomerang GIF?
Switch Boomerang on in Step 2 before you shoot. Each capture then keeps nine quick frames instead of one, which is a little over half a second of movement. Frames carrying a burst wear a small GIF mark. Then press Boomerang GIF in the download row and you get a loop that plays forward then backward. Turning it on afterwards does nothing, because those extra frames were never taken.
Why did Boomerang still give me a still photo?
Because that is how a boomerang works here. The strip is always a still image, since a paper strip cannot move. Boomerang quietly saves the extra frames alongside each shot. Only the Boomerang GIF button turns them into the animation. No video file is ever recorded, so nothing appears until you press that button.
Can I run this as a photo booth at a wedding or a party?
Yes. It costs nothing. Open Party mode, print the scan card and leave it on a table with a ring light and a plain backdrop. Guests scan it, shoot their own strip on their own phone and keep the file immediately. No kiosk to hire, no attendant, no per-print charge.
Does it work on iPhone and Android?
Yes. Mobile Safari and Chrome both hand over the camera. The front and rear lenses are both selectable. Long sessions and big batches take a little longer on an older phone than on a laptop, because your device does the work instead of a server.
How many photos can I take?
As many as you want. The layout decides how many frames go on one strip, which runs from one up to eight. When you are finished, clear the strip and shoot another. There is no daily cap and no counter running in the background.
Does uploading a photo here strip its EXIF and location data?
Yes. The strip is written fresh from pixels rather than copied from the original file, so camera model, timestamps and GPS coordinates from your source photos do not survive into the export. Your originals on your device are untouched.
Can I get my strip back after I close the tab?
No. Nothing is stored anywhere by us, so closing the tab clears everything. Download before you leave. If you still have the source photos, loading them again with the same settings produces an identical strip.
What is a four cut photo strip?
Four photos stacked vertically on one tall strip of paper, usually two inches by six. Korean self photo studios turned the format into a global habit, which is why so many people now search for it by the four cut name rather than by photo strip.
Can I crop a photo after it lands in the strip?
Yes. Click any photo in the frame rail under the camera and a crop panel opens beneath it. A bright rectangle shows the part the frame keeps. Drag inside it to move it, drag a corner to pull it tighter, then press Done. Arrow keys move the box and the plus and minus keys resize it, so it works without a mouse. There is nothing to save, since every drag lands on the strip and on the frame card as you make it. Each frame keeps its own crop, so one photo can be tight on a face while the next stays wide.
What is the difference between crop, fit and stretch?
Crop fills the frame completely and trims whatever hangs over the edges. It is the only one with a crop rectangle, since it is the only one that throws anything away. Fit keeps the entire photo and pads the leftover space with your frame colour. Stretch squashes the photo into the frame shape and distorts it. Crop for photos, fit when nothing can be lost, stretch almost never.
Can I use the same photo in more than one frame?
Yes. Hit Copy on a filled frame and it fills every empty frame with that photo. Open the crop panel and Use in all frames overwrites every frame instead. The crop travels with the copy, so duplicates land looking the same rather than re-centred.
Can I move a photo to a different position?
Yes. Drag any frame card onto the position you want it in and the rest shift along to make room. Move the fourth photo between the first and the second and you get one, four, two, three rather than a straight swap. On a touch screen press Move on the card first, then tap the position. The crop travels with the photo and nothing gets re-shot.
Can I float the strip on a coloured background?
Yes. The Frame tab has a Background margin slider. Push it up and the strip sits on a colour with the same margin on every side, which is the look that reads well on a feed post. Pick the colour from the swatches or from the full colour picker next to them. Leave the margin at zero and the strip fills the picture edge to edge as before.
Can I rotate the strip like a dropped print?
Yes, once there is a background behind it. The Rotate slider runs fifteen degrees each way and turns the strip about its own middle. A roomy margin soaks the turn up, so the strip stays exactly the size it was. On a thin margin the picture grows just enough to keep the corners on rather than slicing them off. Straighten it puts the strip back to level in one click.
Where does the caption print?
Centred in the space under the photos, which is the slab at the bottom of the strip. If you have pulled that space down to nothing there is nowhere for the caption to go, so it will not appear no matter what you type. The Caption box shows how deep that space currently is and offers a button to make room when it runs out.
Can I control the space above the photos separately?
Yes. Spacing carries its own slider for the space above the photos and another for the space under them, so a strip can have a deep header for a logo and a thin bottom, then the other way around if you prefer. Both change the height of the strip rather than the size of the photos. Even gap on all sides matches every edge to the outer border.
Can I change the size and proportions of the strip?
Yes. The Photo proportions slider in the Frame tab stretches each photo cell taller or squashes it wider, which is what makes the whole strip long and thin or short and stubby. Tall, Portrait, Square and Classic presets sit under it. Match the layout puts it back. Be aware that moving off the layout proportions means a strip no longer fills a 2x6 print exactly.
Can I cut the photos into a heart or a circle?
Yes, ten shapes in the Photo shape row of the Frame tab. Square, rounded square, circle, locket oval, heart, arch, diamond, hexagon, five point star and a six petal flower. The cut happens on the pixels, so it survives into the download on every browser. Your frame colour fills in around the shape, which means a heart on white paper prints exactly as it looks.
Why does a face get cut off by the heart shape?
Because a heart is widest across its top and narrows to a point, so anything low and central in the photo falls outside the cut. Open Crop on that frame and drag the box up. Pulling a corner out to widen the box works too, since it puts more room around the face. The circle and the diamond behave the same way at their corners. The star is the fussiest of the lot, since it throws away everything between its points.
Which photo shape is safest for a group?
The square, then the rounded square, then the hexagon. All three keep the full width of the cell where shoulders live. The circle and the locket trim the corners, which is where the people on the ends of a group are standing. The star and the heart are for one or two faces dead centre, nothing more.
Does the camera turn itself off when I am finished?
Yes. The moment the last frame fills, the stream stops and the camera light goes out. That is deliberate, since a light going out is proof the page stopped watching rather than a promise buried in a privacy page. Press Start camera again whenever you want another strip.
Why does the timer say Instant?
Because Instant is the default and it fires the shutter the moment you press a shoot button, which is what most people want when they are posing first and pressing second. The 3, 5 and 10 second countdowns are there for when you need to get back into frame. A Shoot all run always leaves a beat between frames, otherwise it would take four identical photos.
Does it move to the next frame after each shot?
Yes. Shoot frame 1 takes that one photo and then steps the selection on to the next frame still waiting, so pressing the same button four times fills a four cut strip in order. It skips over frames that already hold a photo instead of overwriting them.
Will shooting again wipe the photos I already have?
Not by accident. The big button only ever fills the frames that are still empty and it tells you how many that is. Once every frame holds a photo it changes to Retake all, which is the only control that clears a finished strip in one go. Single frames still get replaced by their own Reshoot button whenever you want.
Can I get the same gap on all four sides?
Yes. The Frame tab has an Even gap on all sides button that matches the bottom slab to the border. Print proportions puts it back to the shape that fills a 2x6 sheet exactly. There is also a slider if you want to land somewhere in between.
What file format do I get?
PNG by default, which keeps the frame edges perfectly crisp. JPG is there when you want a smaller file for messaging, the print buttons give you print sized files and the boomerang export gives you an animated GIF.