Frame Photo Editor for Windows

It's easy to click away with your digital camera or phone and save tons of snapshots to your PC. If you've ever admired someone else's immaculately trimmed and framed digital pictures, there's no reason yours can't look the same; all you need is software that can create borders and frames for your images. But a tool that's too difficult to use is almost worse than no tool at all, especially if you spend a lot of time learning to use it but end up no further than when you started. Not all picture framing tools are alike, though. Frame Photo Editor is a shareware photo editing tool that aims to make it easy to apply a variety of masks, frames, and borders to your pictures. The full-featured trial version has no expiration date but leaves a watermark on saved images.

Frame Photo Editor has a sleek, up-to-date user interface that lists its main features in a menu to the left of the main window, with a toolbar on top and image zoom and fit controls beneath. Of course, you can create and save Projects that let you re-use the same frames and borders over again for a uniform look in your albums, Web site, or prints. We clicked Add a Photo and selected an image from our library, which appeared as a preview in Frame Photo Editor's window, while beneath a scrolling series of masks in a wide range of shapes and styles appeared. We just had to click one to apply it to our image preview. Clicking Change Mask and Photo Size let us fine-tune the fit as well as rotate the image in the mask, which is handy for centering faces. Following the other menu items, we could Add Clips, Select a Frame, Insert Text, Select Background, and bring images to the front or back of a project. The frames are generally colorful and frequently elaborate. Frame Photo Editor groups them by category, such as Seasonal, Cartoon, and Festival.

Frame Photo Editor really doesn't do anything that many free tools don't do, but it's not expensive and certainly worth a try.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Frame Photo Editor 5.0.2.