Simple keyline?

[Clayton King]

I'm trying my darndest to find a simple way to add a keyline or border to photo in Designer. I'm working on a poster with multiple people's headshots, I want to establish a standard size for the picture and either create a rectangle or a cropping curve of specific dimensions and the clip people's photos to that shape. I want a white border on the frame. For my life, I can't get a stroke on a cropping curve to show up. 

Yes, I could create an additional layer with a rectangle and apply the border to it, but seems unnecessarily complicated, and makes the file bigger and more complicated, 

Am i missing an easy way to do this?

[thomaso]

What do you get when you just assign a stroke to the image?
(and: what "cropping curve" do you use if it's not a rectangle, which you want to avoid?)

[firstdefence]

Similar to Thomas but with bends.

example.afdesign

[Clayton King]

I swear I'm losing my mind... I fiddled with this for 30 minutes and couldn't get it to work. Now, on a different laptop and it's fine. WTH?

The challenge is the cropping frame size for pictures. I need the dimensions of all photos to be the same, with a frame which is why I used the cropping tool. Publisher handles this more intuitively than Designer, I think. But regardless, The top left photo is the correct size & dimension. The top right photo needs to be cropped (like it's counterpart below it). Because I'm receiving headshots from multiple people, we felt it better to unify them this way for consistency.

So I guess at this point I need to troubleshoot my other rig and find out why this wouldn't work.

Thanks, all.

[thomaso]

11 hours ago, Clayton King said:

The challenge is the cropping frame size for pictures. I need the dimensions of all photos to be the same, with a frame which is why I used the cropping tool.

Note that a stroke can have three positions: outside, centred, inside. That influences the final size.

Furthermore it makes a difference whether you apply a stroke to the parent layer (e.g. picture frame) or the child layer (cropping rectangle). It influences the visual stroke width if cropped by child layer.

For your layout it seems that Picture Frames (APub) would be the easiest handling.

Below some comparisons for stroke + cropping rectangle: