soften edges of images

These posts above are six years old, and the exhibited application is Pages '09 v4.1. Why are you surprised that the link no longer exists?

However, in Pages '09 v4.1/4.3, there remains a peripheral blur picture frame in the Graphic Inspector stroke selection, that will achieve the visual effect shown by Peggy above. No downloads necessary. Even works on macOS High Sierra.

This blurred picture frame is missing in Pages v6.3.1, so the edge effect will have to be done in an external graphic editor.

I might add, that if you do have Pages '09 v4.3 on macOS High Sierra, that you can create this blurred frame effect to your taste, select the result, copy it to the clipboard, and then launch Preview. From the Preview File menu, choose New from Clipboard, and your blurred-edge image will appear as a PDF that you can then save, and drop back into Pages v6.3.1.

That is called Vignette.

You can do it in a Photoshop style program and import the images (ugly IMHO).

Peter

That link leads to a blank page!

Is this what you're looking for? If so, you can enable all of the frames & strokes “hidden” within the iWork & iWeb applications using this free installer.

After enabling the additional frames, I used the one highlighted in the object inspector under Stroke > Picture Frame.