Pick your photos, choose a background, and you get back versions padded to fit without a single edge cropped off. That’s the whole pitch. It pads vertical and horizontal images out to the opposite orientation so a mismatched batch finally sits together cleanly, and it does it while holding onto HDR.
What it does
Instagram still can’t post a mix of portrait and landscape photos without cropping one shape to match the other, which is the friction this was built to solve. You feed it images and it fills the empty space around them instead of cutting anything off. Backgrounds aren’t fixed either: you can pick stretched blur, zoomed blur, the average dominant colour of the photo, the colour of the top-middle pixel, a custom gradient, or a flat solid colour. The padded result keeps its HDR rather than getting flattened the way most resize tools leave it.
Adding it to your iPhone
- Install Actions and MoE Code from the App Store first, since the shortcut leans on actions they provide.
- Tap Add Shortcut on this page to grab the latest version.
- Confirm the import in the Shortcuts app.
- Run it once so iOS prompts for Photos access and clears any first-time permission dialogs.
Using it day-to-day
The natural way in is the Photos Share Sheet. Select one image or several, tap Share, and pick the shortcut from the list. It asks which background mode you want, builds the padded versions, and opens the Photos app when it’s finished so the output is right there waiting. If you pass a single image, that one photo is offered up in the colour picker too, which helps when you’re hand-tuning a custom gradient or a solid fill. Passing several at once works, and the shortcut handles a mixed batch of orientations in the same pass rather than making you sort them first.
Quick answers
Does it actually keep the HDR or is that wishful thinking?
Holding onto HDR is the point of this version, and it’s right there in the name. Plenty of resize tools strip it without warning, so the padded image you get back should still carry the HDR data rather than a flattened copy.
Why do I need two separate apps for a resize shortcut?
Actions and MoE Code supply image actions that Shortcuts doesn’t include on its own, and MoE Code is the author’s own app. The gradient backgrounds in particular run through it, which is why a banding fix for gradients is tied to a MoE Code update.
Can I throw portrait and landscape shots in together?
That mixed batch is exactly the case it was made for. Select whatever combination you’ve got from the Photos Share Sheet and it pads each one out to the opposite orientation in a single run.
