A system and method for expansion and reduction of images uses variable seam replication to expand an image. Seam carving techniques may be used to identify one or more low-cost seams of an input image, and these low-cost seams may be replicated to produce a resized version of the image. A different replication factor may be applied to different ones of the low-cost seams, dependent on the average or total energy value of each seam. For example, the lowest cost seam may be replicated twice as many times as the next lowest cost seam. The replication factor applied to each seam may be dependent on the number of low-cost seams identified for replication, which may be configurable by users. A configurable look-up table may map seam costs to replication factors, and may be accessed to determine a respective replication factor to be applied to each of the identified low-cost seams.