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Best watermarking software?

P

PokerGuy

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 14, 2010
71
0
London
I run a daily photo blog in connection with one of my websites and recently got tired of my photos being stolen and re-used without credit all over the web. So I began watermarking my pics before posting them on social media and other websites etc - mostly experimenting with the watermarking within lightroom and also tried a couple of free watermarking apps.

However I would like something that is a little more flexible and professional - the only thing i need it for is watermarking but would like to be able to have access to large amounts of fonts. be able to rotate and place in different locations (at an angle etc not just rotating thru 90 degrees each time)

Plus the ablity to place my logo and edit it would be ideal too.

What's the best watermarking software out there? Happy to pay for a good quality easy to use product.....
 
sonicrobby said:
Photoshop would be able to do it. Not sure if its worth that much to you though :p
Click to expand...

Yes I think that would be going overboard as I don't need any other features that photoshop would offer - just need good watermarking options.
 
Gimp does this, and it's freeware.

Edit: Pixelator does too, but it seems like it's easier to do in Gimp imo.
 
Last edited:
Not an expert on this, but AFAIK, a good watermark can be encoded invisibly into an image. And, with the best ones, you can retrieve the watermark even after the image has been substantially re-processed by a thief.

See this Wikipedia article.
 
Any decent image editor will of course do this, but it's not likely to be time-efficient without a bit of setup (recording actions). Pixelmator and Acorn can both do this, and I believe they will also both install an automator action in your system, so that you can make a workflow or application to do it with drag/drop, and/or in batches.

Someone wrote a free watermarking automator action, available in this thread:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1776011/

The action *is* quite old, but I just tested it under 10.9.5 and it works fine.

You might spend a few minutes figuring out how to create automator apps (I'm sure there are numerous youtube tutorials), but you only need to do it once, and then you'll have a free one-click solution.

I've seen a few dedicated watermarking applications, but none of them have really impressed me. My preferred tool is Lightroom, but that's waaay overkill for the task.
 
PokerGuy said:
Yes I think that would be going overboard as I don't need any other features that photoshop would offer - just need good watermarking options.
Click to expand...
You can add watermarking as part of the code that builds the pages to display images. There are tons of tricks to make copying a photo more difficult. Some quick and simple ones: disable right click, full screen watermark layered over the top of the image, that way a copy actually copies only the watermark and not the image underneath. All of this is easily bypassed by someone determined enough. Lastly use the lowest quality images you can get away with online.

Back in the day, I used a PS script to add watermarks to 1000's of images at once. It would run through every image in the folder and add a watermark to it.

Not sure how relevant this is now, but a quick search found:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1477413
 
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