In my portfolio I have case studies, where I explain a bit of my projects and place images of different sizes along with the text. While in some smaller images the user is able to click and view the large version, some other images are clear enough on the page (with no clicking the user is able to see the image in almost it's original size). So my options are:
- differentiate clickable images and non-clickable images (I didn't want to do that as it won't look so good when for example in one column you have an image with a border and on another an image without it)
- make everything clickable even if some images when zoomed in will just repeat the image
- keep the way it is, some images will be clickable and others won't.
The question is: Is it a real issue for users? If there is an image that is clear enough will they still try to click to see a larger version of it? Will they be more frustrated to try to click and nothing happens, or will they be more frustrated to click and see a similar image? (guess is more of an issue for touch-device users as they won't have any hover effect)
Answer
Offering no way to distinguish between clickable and non-clickable images is going to cause confusion, and having the click provide no benefit will cause annoyance, so I think you're stuck with providing some way to identify which images are clickable and which aren't.
As an alternative to borders (which I agree could look messy), you could add a magnifying-glass icon in the corner of images which are clickable:
A second alternative would be to add borders to all images, but differentiate by colour:
... but there's a trade-off here between making the difference too jarring, and making it discernible for people with e.g. colour-blindness.
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