Photo to sticker: cut out the background and print a sticker sheet

Turn a photo into a sticker sheet, step by step

1. Open the sheet maker with background removal on. The button below opens our free 4×6 and 4×7 sheet maker with “Remove photo backgrounds as I add them” ticked. Nothing downloads until you add a photo.
2. Add your photos. PNG, JPG or WebP. The first time, the background remover downloads (about 19 MB, with a progress bar and a Cancel button). Then each photo is cut out in a few seconds.
3. Check every cut-out. Look at the edges in the preview. If a cut-out is wrong, tap ↺ on its thumbnail to get the original photo back. ✂ on a thumbnail removes the background from just that photo.
4. Pick the size, shape and border. Use a preset (1 to 2 in) or a custom width and height from 0.5 to 3.5 in. With the square-or-rectangle shape, the white border follows the outline of the cut-out, which is the classic die-cut sticker look.
5. Choose your printer and download. The preview shows the printer’s published printable area where there is one, plus the safety margin. Download a 300 DPI transparent PNG: 1200 × 2100 px for 4 × 7 in, or 1200 × 1800 px for 4 × 6 in.

Open the sheet maker with background removal on

Pick a photo that cuts out well

• One clear subject: a pet, a person, a toy, a mug. The model keeps the main subject and drops small extras.
• A background that contrasts with the subject: a white dog on a white sofa is hard, the same dog on grass is easy.
• The whole subject in the frame. A subject cut off by the edge of the photo gets a straight edge on the sticker.
• Nothing touching or in front of it. A chair leg crossing a cat usually stays attached to the cat.
• Enough pixels for the size you want; see the table below.

What automatic background removal can’t do

The sheet maker uses U²-Netp, the small version of the U²-Net salient-object model (4.7 MB) (U²-Net on GitHub), run by ONNX Runtime Web in your browser (ONNX Runtime). We picked it because it is small enough to download on a phone and its licence allows this use. Larger models cut out hair and fine detail better, but they are tens of megabytes or more.

• It guesses the subject. In a busy photo it may pick the wrong thing or keep two things. Groups of people or pets are kept only when they are similar in size.
• Fine detail is soft. Wisps of hair or fur, whiskers, lace and thin straps are often lost or keep a little background.
• Similar colours merge. Where subject and background have the same colour, the edge can go astray.
• Glass, smoke and shadows have no clear edge to find.

Always check the preview before printing. For a tricky photo, cut it out in a photo editor and add the transparent PNG instead: the sheet maker gives any transparent PNG the same outline border.

How big can the sticker be?

The StickerPix Print + Cut and the PixCut S1 print at 300 DPI (Cricut shop (US); Liene tech specs), so a sticker needs about 300 pixels of photo per inch to print sharp. The sheet maker marks any image that would print below 200 DPI at the chosen size and keeps up to 1050 px on the short side of a photo, enough for its largest 3.5 in sticker.

Printing a photo sticker sheet on your printer

Liene PixCut S1

Choose the 4×7 output and the “Liene PixCut S1” paper preset. Liene lists a 3.9 × 6.7 in printable size on its 4 × 7 in sticker paper (Liene tech specs), and the preview draws it as a blue dashed line. The Liene app accepts JPEG, PNG and HEIC (Liene tech specs), and Liene says transparent PNGs help its automatic outline cutting (Liene product page). Liene says the PixCut S1 works only with official Liene paper (Liene materials guide).

Cricut StickerPix Print + Cut

Upload the PNG in Design Space as an image (Cricut Help Center) and check it is 4 × 7 in on the canvas. Cricut doesn’t publish a printable area for StickerPix, so the sheet maker keeps a 0.15 in design margin, our assumption. Whether Design Space cuts each sticker on a combined sheet separately, or only around the outer outline, is untested.

Cricut StickerPix Print (pre-cut sheets)

The pre-cut shapes are fixed, so a full-sheet PNG won’t line up with them. Place your photos into Cricut’s pre-cut templates in Design Space instead; see the pre-cut setup guide.

Canon SELPHY CP1500

Choose the 4×6 output. Canon lists 4.0 × 6.0 in postcard, L, card and square label paper sizes for the SELPHY CP1500, and no cutter (Canon spec sheet). A postcard print is a photo, not a sticker, and shapes have to be cut out by hand. See PixCut S1 vs SELPHY.

More detail for each app: how to upload your own designs.

Privacy: the photo stays on your device

Background removal runs in your browser, in a background thread so the page stays responsive. The model and its runtime are served from this site, not a third-party service, and are cached by your browser after the first download. Your photos, the cut-outs and the sheet are never uploaded, and nothing is saved when you close the page. If you have allowed analytics, we count that a background was removed (how many photos and how long it took), never the image.

Questions