Why your photocard prints smaller (and how to fix it)

You designed a card at 55 × 85 mm, hit print, and the card that comes out doesn’t fit the sleeve the way an album photocard does. You measure it: 52 × 80 mm. You’re not alone: it’s the most common problem when printing photocards at home, and it has a short list of causes.

1. “Fit to page” is on

Almost every print dialog has a scaling option. On iPhone and iPad it’s often hidden under Options; on a computer it’s called Fit to page, Shrink to fit, Fit to printable area or a percentage like 97 %. Any of them recalculates the size of the whole page so it fits inside the printer’s margins, and your cards shrink by 3 to 6 %.

Fix: choose Actual size or 100 %. When you print from mallow with AirPrint, the page is drawn 1:1 and never goes through “fit to page”.

2. “Borderless” is on

Borderless printing does the opposite: it enlarges the image a little so it bleeds past the paper edge. Your cards come out slightly bigger, and the ones near the edge get cropped.

Fix: turn off borderless. You don’t need it: mallow already adds 2 mm of bleed around each card, so a slightly off cut never shows white.

3. The file was resized on the way

If you send the design through a chat app or social network first, it’s often compressed and resized. When you print that image, the printer has no idea of its real size and guesses.

Fix: print the PDF directly, or export the image at 300 ppi (a photocard is 650 × 1004 px at 300 ppi) and send it as a file, not as a photo.

4. Your printer is slightly off

Even at 100 %, some printers feed paper a little faster or slower, and the card ends up 1 mm short in one direction. It’s small, but you notice it in a toploader.

Fix: calibrate once. In mallow, print the test sheet: it has a 100 mm ruler and the outline of a card. Measure the ruler with a real ruler and enter the number. If it measures 98 mm, mallow scales that printer’s cards by 100/98 from then on (it accepts anything between 90 % and 110 %).

Quick checklist

Check	Should be
Scale	100 % / Actual size
Borderless	Off
Paper size in the dialog	The same as the paper you loaded (A4 or Letter)
Quality	Photo / Best
Test ruler	Measures 100 mm

Still not right?

Measure the crop marks, not the white border. The marks show where the card ends; the artwork continues 2 mm beyond them on purpose. If the distance between marks is 55 × 85 mm, the card is right: you just need to cut inside the marks.