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Add Border and Copyright to your Photographs

‘Add a border and copyright notes to your images with IrfanView’

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Use IrfanView to batch process all of them at once

Adding a black border to your images and watermarkingDigital_watermarking them with your name is a simple way to frame and sign your photographs without effort and, which is more, without corrupting the very images.
You can use Irfanview, a reliable, high quality, free open-source software for handling images. Irfanview works in batch mode, thus allowing you to relax and drink a coffee while the whole job is in progress.
You are just a few steps away from a well done work.

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Do it step by step…

Start Irfanview: you’ll see a black window. The screenshots you see here are not from the latest release, but the workflow is just the same.
Press B to enter batch mode or find it under the File menu.

Basic Irfanview batch functions are set by the main panel (here at left), from which an advanced set of functions can be accessed (here at right).

Drag your image folder into the left area: all files will get listed at once. Tick advanced options and follow the image…

We are not in the position to state that borderless images are better or worse than others. Thin or thick lines, blue, black, any shade of grey, anything might be fine and it depends on your own taste.

Try with black 10 pixel (set 11 pixel on the bottom side) border, no matter how you image is big.

Why we suggest this approach:

• At full size, the border acts like a pleasing frame.
• As you resize your image, the border easily becomes a nice thin black line.
• It does not add much to the file size.
• The bottom side in a fine place for copyright notices.
• Next to the copyright you can add other infos, like month/year and/or location.

So, what about the result?
Well, it will be close to the botton-right detail you can see here.

The nice thing about this solution is that you can process 1–10–100–1000–10000 photographs at once, without any effort.

Do not forget to set .jpg quality to 100%!
This is especially important in case you apply the process more than once to the same image.

Obviously one can also use IrfanView to only watermark images: just skip the Add image border (Canvas size) step, and you’ll end up writing into your photograph. Adjust the size, position and transparency of your text, and you are done. Mind: it is not a safe game, unless you have a backup copy of each image.

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Not fancy enough?

You can gently watermark and frame your images by slightly adapting the primer above to a lesser harsh aesthetic and reiterating the Add image border (Canvas size) step with different colors and width.

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Not satisfied yet?

Irfanview is certainly not the only tool you can use to create borders and stick a copyright notice on your pictures.
If you are lucky enough to have a Mac you can give BorderFX a try. BorderFX is a plug-in available both for Aperture and iPhoto.

Not to mention the vast multitude of standard tools: Photoshop, Gimp and many more…

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