Will My Photos Be Cropped? How Phone Photos Fit a 20×20 cm Album Page

Phone photos are rectangles. A Foreva album page is a square. So it's fair to ask: what happens to the bits that don't fit?

Many photo-book apps fill every page edge to edge, which means trimming off whatever sticks out. Usually that's sky or floor. Sometimes it's the top of someone's head. Foreva works the other way round.

The short answer: nothing is cut off

Every photo is printed whole. Instead of cutting your photo to fit the page, we shrink it until all of it fits inside the page, then centre it. The space left over becomes a soft border, like the mount in a picture frame.

The same goes for your cover photo: it sits whole inside a cream frame on the front, with your title underneath.

What that looks like on the page

The finished page is 20 × 20 cm. We keep a small margin of about 5 mm all round so nothing important sits near the edge where the page is trimmed. That leaves a picture area of about 19 × 19 cm.

Here's how common photo shapes come out:

Most phone photos are 3:4, so most of your pages will look like a generous photo with a neat border on two sides.

What colour is the border?

By default, each page gets its own border colour: a muted shade picked from that photo, darkened and softened so it doesn't compete with the picture. A beach photo might get a soft blue mount; a sunset a warm brown. Black-and-white photos get cream.

Prefer something plainer? When your preview arrives, reply WHITE or CREAM and every page switches to that border. Reply AUTO to go back to colours that match each photo.

One photo per page, in the order you sent them

Every photo gets its own page, in the same order you sent them in the chat. No collages and no shuffling. Your cover photo is chosen separately and isn't repeated inside.

Albums need an even number of pages. If you finish on an odd number, Foreva tells you your next photo is free so the last page isn't wasted. If you'd rather print as it is, the final page becomes a simple cream "thank you" page.

What you see is what you get

Before you pay anything, you get a preview in the chat. It uses exactly the same layout as the printed book, so the borders and sizes you see are the ones that get printed. The diagonal watermark and the little photo numbers are only there to help you check; they're not printed.

If a photo looks too small with big borders (a long panorama, for example), you can drop it before printing: reply REMOVE and its number, for example REMOVE 7.

Tips for the best-looking pages

• Mix portrait and landscape. Alternating shapes makes the album feel lively as you turn the pages.
• Skip screenshots where you can. They're tall and thin, so they print narrow. Send the original photo instead.
• Send in HD. In WhatsApp, tap HD before sending; your photos print sharper. More in our guide to WhatsApp photo quality for printing.
• Choose a cover photo with room to breathe. It's framed in cream, so a photo with a clear subject works best.

The bottom line

Your photos won't be cropped. Each one is printed whole, centred on its own 20×20 cm page, with a border that suits it, and you see every page before you pay.

Ready to try it? See how Foreva works, or read the photo album size and format guide.