How To Put A Border Around An Image In Inkscape
This seems to be a common request in Inkscape: you’ve imported an image, and you want to put a stroke or border around that image.
Surely Inkscape has some simple option to do this? Maybe you could just apply a stroke and voilà - a border around your image!
Except, no, Inkscape has no such feature.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Here’s how to do it:
- Select the image and note the width and height.
- Create a rectangle that is the same width and height as the image.
- Align the center of the rectangle to be the same as the center of the image.
- Lower the rectangle below the image.
- Apply a stroke to the rectangle.
Here’s an example with images:
Select the image and note the width and height. Here the width is 132.292 and the height is 79.375:
Here I’ve created a rectangle of the same width and height:
- Select both objects and open the Align and Distribute view (Shift+Ctrl+A or the icon)
- Align both the verticle and horizontal centers by selecting the Center on vertical axis and Center on horizontal axis icons.
- Select only the rectangle and lower it below the image:
- While the rectangle is still selected, set the stroke. I’ve set the stroke below by shift-clicking black on the bottom color rail:
- As always, you can play with the stoke by opening the Fill and Stroke view (Shift+Ctrl+F or whatever your favorite way is):
Consider grouping the image and the rectangle together so you don’t accidentally get them separated!
So there you have it. Putting a border around an image in Inkscape definitely could be easier, but it’s not hard. At least for a rectangular image!