You can do the feathering in Xara too, much faster than in PS, and in groups of photos too. You won’t need to crop the result – just export as PNG – true colour + Alpha (or, for transparent Gifs you need to make sure the images are exported against a colour that matches the one you intend to put the result against).
In the attached file I took 4 photos and feathered them in Xara (all at once). See the attached xar file for instructions.
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