Resources Mentioned
- 45 Day Free Trial of Canva Pro (Affiliate Link)
- Save Time With Canva’s Design to Image App (Tutorial)
Transcript
You may sometimes find that you’re not able to fit some of your images into frames the way that you’d like.
You try to add the image but the edges keep getting cut off and you’re not able to resize it to be smaller inside of the frame such that the full image can be seen.
You’re able to easily enlarge the image inside of the Canva frame, but not make it smaller, and every time you try, it just continues to crop the image.
So what are you do in this situation?
First, let me explain why this happens.
When you use a Canva frame, the placeholder area of the frame is designed to be entirely filled by an image.
As a result, the outer edges of your image cannot be smaller than the frame size.
You can see here when I double click on the frame to display the full image, the outer square edges of the image is at the very edge of the frame.
If I made it smaller, you would see empty frame behind it, which is why Canva doesn’t enable you to do that.
I can make the image larger because the frame is still filled, but I can’t make it smaller because the frame wouldn’t be filled.
So here’s how you fix it.
You’re going to create a new design and add your image to the page.
But don’t make the image fill the entire design space. Instead, you’ll want to leave white space around it.
Now save your design as a new image, and a little tip, you can use the “Design to Image” app in Canva to do this really quickly. I have another Canva tutorial showing you how to use it and I’ll link to that below this video.
Now I’m going to pull that image into the frame again, and this time you’ll see that it’s *not* cutting off because the image I’ve used has that white space around it that we added.
This is the solution I would normally use, but if you’re looking for an even quicker hack, if the image you’re trying to add has a solid colour behind it, another option is to just fill the frame with that same colour and then to place your image on top of it, so that you can easily resize it as a separate component. Just be sure to lock your frame first to ensure that it doesn’t pull the image into the frame.
But ultimately, using a version of your original image with increased whitespace is going to result in a far better quality design because it will be able to crop the edges of your image with more precision.
