5 Ways to Build Classy Photo Frames On a Mac

What has iPhoto done for you lately? True, it stores and manages all your digital photos. Tens of thousands of photos. Sort photos by event or date or person or whatever.

What iPhoto does not do well is display your photos for friends and family in attractive, classy, or contemporary frames. To do that, Mac users need something extra. My tool of choice is a little utility called ImageFramer.

Expensive Photo Frames Without The Expense

My wife and I live in Paris, France. She teaches in a school and I work for a US-based technology company. We brought our Macs with us. Including approximately 10,000 photos in iPhoto.

Here’s the problem that ImageFramer solved. We want photos to share.

We want them to look nice and be displayed in attractive frames. Frames in France cost an arm, a leg, and part of my remaining stock market winnings from when AAPL was a mere two digits.

So, how do we go about creating attractive photos with matching frames to populate our smaller-than-in-the-US apartment, and make great gifts for family and friends who might like to see where we live (less than a mile from the Eiffel Tower)?

It’s A Digital Frame Farm

Drop one of your favorite photos into ImageFramer, select a frame to match, and print. It’s almost that easy. Except for the printing part.

There are dozens and dozens of frame styles to choose—classic and ornate, modern and stylish—even mats of every color and size. Each frame can be color adjust for saturation, hue, and brightness to perfectly match your photo.

The frame widths can be adjust to match the photo size, including mats. Lighting can be adjusted to give frames and mats a totally photorealistic look. Frame variations let you view multiple frames on the same photo at the same time to compare.

Whatever design you use or create can be saved and used again. ImageFramer also lets you batch process and apply a frame design to many photos at once.

Controls are elegant and straightforward and give you options to create frames from various images, including mats. Change colors, add watermarks, even adjust the shadows on a frame.

Slick, Sassy, Fun, And Flawed

There just isn’t much to not like about ImageFramer. The quality of the frame images is superb. You’ve never seen anything quite like it on a Mac.

It takes just a few minutes to figure out how to use it. The manual can be downloaded in PDF format, but you won’t spend much time using it.

There’s an online community for support, and plenty of tutorials, including how-tos for making perfectly seamless frames and framing stock. Truly, this is a Mac app that brings back the gee whiz factor. But with one glaring problem.

ImageFramer doesn’t print. Instead, you can export your photo and frame and share the image with family and friends via email. Or, print using Preview. Or, take the image to a printer to get a larger size or duplicates. Or, place the image online (Flickr, MobileMe, etc).

If you love photos and frames, ImageFramer is as sweet and creatively inspiring an app as you’re likely to find. Highly recommended.