Removing Instagram borders

[Tom Martin WC]

Although Instagram has supported all shapes of pictures for almost a year now, anyone who downloads older pictures is often stuck with the problem of the two-sided borders created by various third-party products for those that did not want to crop their images.  People wanting to remove them from their Instagram accounts are likely out of luck, but how about a simple utility to strip them from downloaded pictures?  Windows Paint has an option to change the color of the borders, but it leaves a strip of junk next to the picture.

 

What's needed is an easy way to either strip the borders or convert them to black (some people may want to convert black to white).  The current workaround is to manually crop each photo but that can be time-consuming and more than a little boring.  For those who like four-sided borders, I suppose the utility could also offer to create those.

 

A search of the web reveals nothing, so this seems like an opportunity for an enterprising programmer to get his/her foot in the image-processing door.