How to get rid of box outline on a placed image in Illustrator

[meredithd12778761]

Hello and thank you for your time.  I am a student graphic designer and I am practicing using Illustrator.  I had a question about placing images and vectorizing/image tracing them.  It seems like with a placed image I always get a box around the image that becomes an outline when I image trace it that I can't get rid of.  So when I make changes to the stroke of the placed image, the "box" our "outline" also changes the same way.  How would i get rid of the box or outline around a placed image?

Thank you so much for your time!  Take care.

Meredith

[Barbara Ash · Accepted solution]

You can select the box with the Group Selection tool (white arrow with a + next to it). Be careful to click on the edge of the box, when making the selection. Then you can delete.

If the background of the image you are tracing is white, and there is no white that you want to keep within the image, you can expand the Advanced section of the Image Trace panel and choose Ignore White.

[jow2070051]

You've just saved me a headache!  thanks

[defaulttsp346sfc21v · Accepted solution]

I came across the same issue and followed these instructions, it did work, but it was not the Group Selection Tool as that deleted all anchors. Instead the Direct Selection Tool and was able to delete the anchors along the artboard and got rid of the white box behind it.

[imeddings]

Sounds like you just need to expand the resulting image after the image trace. Once expanded, use the direct selection tool (white arrow) to select that outline and delete it.

[Jeka5E1B · Accepted solution]

I'm also a graphic design student who also had exactly this problem.  I had placed a linked image (not an embedded image) into my Ai doc, so the solution to expand the image didn't work because linked images cannot be converted into objects. 

I reached out to the design lab on my campus for help.  They were quite puzzled by what was causing the outlines to appear, but after exploring many possibilites, we found that by turning off and unlocking all layers, the outlines were still present.  When I clicked on the outline using the selection tool (black arrow), the word "Artboard" followed by a number appeared in the upper left corner of the outline.  I used my selection tool to click on the word Artboard, then pressed the delete key on my keyboard.  After pressing delete, the word Artboard appeared again, but with a different number.  There were actually FIVE artboards stacked on top of each other, each creating its own outline.  I have absolutely no idea how these artboards were created.  I had to press the delete key one time for each artboard.  After all the artboards were deleted, the mysterious outlines disappeared. 

[Kimberly28604781luwm]

Thank you!!