Adding Borders to Pictures

Besides being a programmer, I like taking pretty pictures (and working with wood, but that’s another story). And from time to time I like to print some pictures and hang them on a wall.

Because framing pictures is expensive and, frankly, most of them don’t deserve it, I like to print a “virtual frame” – a thin black border followed by a wide white border – around each photo. Until recently, I was adding them in some stupid program I found on the Internet (it doesn’t deserve to be named), but I was always having problems because you had to specify border width in pixels – and if I wanted to set the same border (for example, a 1,5 mm black border followed by a 20 mm white border) for a set of pictures in a different resolutions, I had to calculate pixel sizes for each photo, which was a pain.

So I sat down and wrote a border-adding program. It allows you to specify border sizes in “real” measures, it can process one picture or a folder full of them and it can add a suffix to processed pictures (plus it will skip files containing this suffix if they are found in the source folder) and that’s about it. It is small, simple, solves a real problem and – what I found the most impressing – I wrote it in a single working day. Truth to be told, I needed about a month of work – an hour here, 15 minutes there – but all together I needed less than eight hours. That is the power of Delphi!

If you have a need for such tool, go ahead and download it from my Dropbox. You can also get the source, which is released to a public domain (i.e., do with it whatever you want). It depends on few external libraries, which are all released with an open source license: JCL, JVCL, GpDelphiUnits, OmniXML. At the moment the GUI is written in VCL, because I really didn’t want to spend too much time on this project and I know VCL by heart, but if somebody wants to go ahead and rewrite it in FireMonkey, I certainly won’t stand in his/her way.