If don’t already know, I use Adobe Lightroom as my photo manager and developer. I won’t get into all the specifics here, but suffice it to say that it has a ton of features advanced amateurs and professional photographers alike will find useful.

One of the killer features of the program is the plugin support. You can add plugins to perform specific actions to streamline your workflow beyond the features built-in to Lightroom. I have been using the flickr exporter for a while.  I finally installed another plugin which performs several operations, but I was specifically interested in the border feature.  The plugin is called LR Mogrify, it was written by Tim Armes.  Check out Tim’s page for a quick howto and installation guide.  It’s pretty straight-forward, I had the plugin installed and running in under 10 minutes.  As I am running Vista, I had to also the ImageMagick conversion utilities prior to the plugin installation.

The nice thing about this plugin is that it is actually called a post-process filter, which means you can use the features on any of the Export functions in Lightroom.  This will allow me to get a consistent output if I am generating a jpg to upload to my website or sending an image to flickr.

There are lots of options to play with, but here is a quick example of a simple 2-border option I created.  I plan to do some more experimenting with the plugin to create more advanced “matte looking” borders.