Print Padding & Formatting
Emily Devlin avatar
Written by Emily Devlin
Updated over a week ago

Each printer will handle the formatting of your print on the printer’s paper slightly differently, and our padding feature allows you to fine-tune the look of your prints. 

Be sure to reference our general formatting help too if you are new to printing with Simple Booth!


What Padding Does

Padding adds blank space to the top, bottom, left or right of the layout that is sent to the printer.

This helps compensate if your printer is cutting off part of your photo(s) or the margins or picture frames of your layout are not well aligned.

  • Adding positive values to the padding will increase the margins

  • Adding negative values to the padding will decrease the margins. The need to introduce negative padding is uncommon.


Print Padding Best Practices

  • Most printers center the print on the paper, so your top padding should generally equal your bottom padding, and your left padding should generally equal your right padding. This may not always be the case.

  • Start small! Make adjustments in 1/4 inch increments (0.25) to start. 

  • Don't change top/bottom padding and left/right padding at the same time. Change each “pair” at a time and then make a test print to see changes. 

  • You can also use padding to get clever results with sheets that already have content printed on them or leave a space for the guest to write on the photo after it prints.

  • If your layout still does not match up with the printer paper well, you might consider using the Force Fit feature instead of or together with print padding. 

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