Bulk Watermark Tool for Windows

Off-topic Chatter
1

As a blogger just starting out, it quickly became obvious that it was common for unscrupulous sites and sellers to use photos not taken by them for commercial gain. I’m fine with people using my photos for whatever floats their boat, as long as I get credit for the work. Which is why we all use watermarks.

So being a programmer, I created my own watermark tool for Windows. Over time, it kind of took on a life of its own, and it finally ended up as an actual product. I think it’s a useful tool and I think others might find it useful as well. I know there are a lot of photographers here, and I would greatly appreciate as much feedback as possible, since I’m still definitely an amateur photographer.

The technology behind it is fairly mundane; it’s written in C# and for the most part uses the built in imaging libraries as well as an open source toolkit for the EXIF stuff. The only really remarkable thing is that it’s well built, which is sadly uncommon these days for software. Since I’m on disability obviously I could use a few sales, but any photographer here (professional or not) in need at BLF can always get a free license if they use the contact form on my site. There’s also a free version which has the full functionality of the Full version except with a (hopefully gentle) nag screen and a Pro Trial version with a 30 day trial of the full functionality.

The watermark tool, web site (Drupal w/ UberCart), online help (ASP .Net), licensing and activation server were all done by me, so I welcome feedback on every last bit of it since it’s been a labor of love more than anything.

It has an extensive preview screen which lets you preview every single photo in the batch before it’s run. As you can see, it’s capable of doing alpha blending to blend the watermark into the target image if you use a PNG or text based watermark. The slider is simply the percent opacity from 1-100 in 10 percent increments if I remember correctly.

The preview screen even lets you look at the metadata for the currently selected photo in the preview, as well as basic file and image information you’d expect to see.


What I’m most proud of with this product is nothing the end user will ever see: the code. I’ve worked on many systems in my 25 year career, from code that controlled the NYC subway in the 90’s and lots of other vital infrastructure stuff like banking, insurance and finance, and you would probably be shocked to see the internal state of most codebases today. Nobody would buy software if they could see under the hood. But I don’t think the end user is as dumb as the suits in marketing think they are, and it’s been great putting the extra time that nobody would let me put in if this were a big-budget product launch. So hopefully I succeeded in imparting the same secret ingredient as my grandma’s tollhouse cookies, and again, I welcome any feedback, good or bad.

Thanks for reading and let me know what you guys and gals think. The contact form on the web site is probably the best way to reach me since it goes straight to my phone.

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Nice work! One day when I take photos worth watermarking I will have to give this a shot.

3

Wow…awesome!

Great job!

4

+1

5

Thanks for the kind words :slight_smile:

I forgot to mention that there are both 64 and 32 bit versions available for download. I’ve noticed that the 64 bit version does run large batches much faster. Also, sorry, but Windows 8 will tell you it’s probably a virus from a shady publisher because I’m a small shop and don’t have the ridiculous fee to buy the security certificate from a CA. So you need to press the “more info” or whatever the link says to continue anyway. It’s already sold a few non-relative-or-friend copies from download.com so maybe it will justify the cert someday. Either way I appreciate any feedback.

Also, the Pro version will write several metadata fields: copyright, author and user comments. The next version I think will let the user list of metadata fields to set in bulk. That way you could stamp whatever EXIF fields you want from the long list of allowable fields, though it would be more to fumble around with. But for right now at least to me those seem like the 3 most important fields.

All versions can do a text watermark where you can set all the variables like opacity, font face, font size, etc.




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Hi Racer. First of all great looking software and attractively priced regular version. A price most users would be able to afford if they need the software. I want to make some hopefully positive criticism…

Reading from your website I see this “This is the PRO version of the Bulk Watermark Tool, with all of the features of the Full version plus other useful capabilities such as watermark profiles, using images as watermarks and setting photo metadata”

Does that mean the regular version cannot use image as watermark?

edit: Also, I see that on your website, you do not have a page comparing features of the different versions in a table. Many if not most of the websites I have consulted offering regular, pro or whatever version have this table to help users.

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Correct.

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I was working on that last night but ran out of steam. Marketing is not my strong suit, but it is something I intend to finish, thanks. Basically the Pro version has a few key extra features: images as watermarks, setting metadata and user profiles for keeping more than one set of settings for example if you have multiple blogs like me. Those are the key differences, though I’m also working on another extra tab for the Pro version that will let you batch resize the photos as well with a target image size, cutting the watermarked copies down to size while preserving aspect ratio.

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Faststone Viewer allows for pictures (various formats, or text) to be used as watermarks in its batch conversion. I don’t use watermarks, but if I did I’d probably use FS for that too, simply because it saves me the effort of running a second batch processing.
So… many people use photoshop, which allows the use of third party plugins. Making one of these, in addition to the standalone, would make it easier for people to integrate your program into their workflow.

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Hmm I never thought of writing a Photoshop plugin. That’s a great idea, thanks. I’m toying with a bunch of ideas including an Android version and a “batch studio” type project with a plugin architecture geared more towards batch processing. Because there’s so many other batch oriented tasks like re-sizing, creating thumbnails, setting metadata—there’s a lot of possibilities.

I’m no genius with Photoshop but it seems like it’s geared more towards single editing of documents. But either way I’ll look at whatever plugin spec. I despise Adobe but one thing they are good at is well documented interfaces. And clearly I need to understand professional photographers’ workflow better.

There’s another project in the oven, too. Well written apps using encryption are virtually non-existent, so I’m almost done with an encrypted notes program which is a simple tool to encrypt rich text (like Evernote) with no back door, big brother or shenanigans. And even though it’s going to have a cloud-storage feature, all the encryption/decryption is done on the client end, so there will be no way for my company to access any user’s data, even under duress. And if demanded to put in a back door, I will shut the thing down and release the code open source. It’ll use some badass technical features like multi-factor authentication and even steganography, which is so rarely discussed that all the spell checkers tell me it’s not a word…

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Nice, would have been all over this a few years ago. Finally got Lightroom and import everything through it, don’t understand it, but use it.

I’ll definitely be looking at this though, always open to anything that helps. (If I stay in business, things are so slow these days I’ll probably forget how to use my 1DsMkII)

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Thanks, and let me know if you want a key if you find it useful. You’ve already given me a couple really good photography tips (like focus stacking-see headlamp image above) so I’d definitely be interested in anything you have to say. I only got my SL1 about a year ago, but it seems like it’s always been with me. It holds all the mystery that computers used to. And unlike my other cameras, if it doesn’t get a good picture, I know for sure that I’m the weak link :wink:

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I finally finished the feature comparison. I’m getting ready to start thinking about marketing it while I work on the next tool. While I am just a little man, I know some very tall people, so hopefully I can maybe find some backing to be able to do some real marketing. I know it’s highly useful, but I suck at marketing, and I barely understand my market for it.