Image Borders? Love Em / Hate em?

I have been looking at some preset in Light Room and few other programs that will create a border around your image.

I wanted to get some opinions about image borders. They can give a very nice finished off appearance to photographs but I can also see them being problematic if you ever go to print your images depending on the style of the border (such a drop shadow).

I do a lot of event photography so I need to do A LOT of cropping, things get in my way. Up to this point I am exporting in Long Side 1280 Pixels and non standard hight which also may prove to be problematic for printing and borders.

Exporting for web and print are two completely different things. Just because you use a border for web use does not mean you have to use it for print. In fact, I often use a border in print and not on the web.

You are tossing two different things in here -- borders and cropping (evidently to different aspect ratios) so you need to differentiate here. Borders are "whatever works" for the image -- it may be different between the Web and print, and so you have to bear that in mind and maybe prepare two different versions for each.

Cropping and aspect ratio have similar but different considerations. You may crop to get a "pleasing composition" and that is common, but then if you set out to print you will find that there are "standard" print and framing sizes which are the easiest to conform to, or you have to go to an extra cost for custom matting and/or framing.

So, crop for a pleasing composition but do it with a standard aspect ratio is the easy way of doing things, but save that for the "final" output, rather than "setting it in stone".

The beauty of using a program like lightroom is that you do not have to choose. You can store your pictures without borders and when you export them for web use have borders automatically applied.

You can also have multiple crops of the same picture without having multiple copies of the file if you want to.