Borders: Yay or Nay?

So I'm slowly learning more and more about this "post processing" thing, and one thing I've seen come up a lot is the use, or lack of use, of borders around images. To keep things simple, I'm talking about a simple black border, or if we want to get fancy, a white inner/black outer border, along with a watermark & perhaps image title in the border.

My question is, what do you guys think is "better" to show off your photos? This is entirely subjective, but I'm going to ask that you refrain from "because it looks better." I want to know why it looks better.

I'm doing some work with ImageMagick and LightRoom and scripting and all sorts of craziness, and I realized it'd be quite trivial to add borders to my workflow...but I'm not really sold either way on them yet. The only advantage I've found is it makes it very simple to batch watermark my photos without worrying about the watermark completely ruining the photo.

I said whatever makes the photo look good. I put borders on some not all of my images. I guess for posting on the forums yes, large prints or prints maybe.

No; makes extra work in post and the image should stand on its own.

cdifoto wrote in post #5036657
No; makes extra work in post and the image should stand on its own.

The reason I asked this question is because I'm at a point where I could very easily put borders into my workflow, meaning that there would be no additional work beyond checking "Add borders", unless you're counting how many clock cycles are used to process the picture .

As far as having an image stand on it's own, does a simple black border really make that much of a difference in how you see an image? I understand in print it could, hence fancy framing and matting, but when viewing on a computer screen do the same factors apply?

If it's a simple border that doesn't distract, it doesn't affect me in any way and is unnecessary. If it's a fancy border that either impresses me or makes me think it's ugly, it's distracting and unnecessary.

I have no rules that apply to every image every time. Call me a free spirit.

Depends on the image usage.