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How to Add Borders To Your Photos

Many people like a nicely framed photograph. But for many of us, photographs largely live online, ready to be admired and/or criticised by the masses. For some situations, a virtual border or frame make the picture very attractive.

Picnik

Picnik is a thoroughly friendly free site which allows you to edit the images online. If you want a quick, thoroughly visual way to edit photos, it's very good tool.

Picnik supplies you with five types of frames in the free scenario, and a few more for those willing to fork out cash. You can adjust the effects easily for the frames, and in some cases stack the frames on each other for a more comprehensive effect.

add border around image

Once you add the capability to mess with the distance, angle, size and amount of fade, you have a fairly comprehensive tool. The other free frame options are border, rounded edges, matte and Polaroid. For instance the Drop Shadow border tool lets you adjust the colours of both the shadow and the background, including the option to pick colours from the image itself.

Pikfix

pikifx is a similar sort of beast. I prefer the picnik interface, but I like some of the pikifx options.

It's good tool to add some border and photo effects very quickly.

The settings within each of the tools covers a lot of ground as well, but the same rule applies. You can see from the list that the options are more comprehensive. That capability comes with a less friendly interface, I think.

Of course if you link to your flickr account, or one of the other options, then you’re no longer quite so anonymous.Both picnik and pikifx are happy to work with images on your behalf without either payment or sign-up, and that’s nice.

Irfanview

If you’re more comfortable with an offline option, running Windows, Irfanview provides a solid option. Let’s face it. The last thing you want to do is to overpower your image with an impressively complex border.

If you have an entire folder of images to put black borders around, this is seriously painless Irfanview can also batch process the borders

Once you are viewing an image, either choose the Batch Conversion/Rename option from the File menu, or hit the ‘b’ key on the keyboard.

irfanview

Select the files you wish to apply borders to, tick the Use advanced options and click the Advanced button.

There’s one important thing to remember. If you’ve been in here before, then Irfanview will remember the settings from that session. On the other hand, if you want to, you can apply a bunch of other changes at the same time as the borders. Just make sure you want to do that.So if you increased the contrast of a group of photos previously, check that you’ve turned the option off now, or you’ll have a batch of seriously eye-popping images.

The borders are set up in the confusingly named Canvas size option, so tick that and hit the Settings button.

irfanview-canvas

The settings shown are the default ones. Three pixels on each edge of the image, and Model T black. Adjust these options as you please, and tap the OK button. In the more recent versions of the application, you can also use negative numbers in the pixel spaces, which trims the edges off the images rather than adding a border. Useful, but not something you want to do by mistake.

Back in the Advanced dialogue, note that there are some options there relating to overwriting files, and creation of subfolders. I’m certainly hoping that you would have backed the images up before using this for the first time, but take some time and care with these settings to be sure you have the behaviour you want. note also that when you get back to the main Batch Conversion page there is a section on the left which lets you select the output location.

Click OK again to return to the Batch Conversion page, and when you are happy with your selections click on Start batch to begin adding borders to your images. Enjoy.

irfanview-red-border