I am returning to my old ways. Sounds scary no? Actually it just means a bit more organization for me and predictability for you. I used to do Wednesday App of the Week. But today is Thursday and this post will go live tomorrow. So Wednesday App of the Week is transforming into a Friday Find. (Skip down to the Photo Watermark heading if you just want the review and not my delightful lead up to it.)
In the manner of any good 21st Century entrepreneur, the recent leaks of celebrity images, got me to thinking about how to protect my highly prized images. Oh stop it! Not that kind of image.
I have hundreds if not thousands of images that I created for use in Virtual Worlds when I built, played, and mingled in them. They were primarily textures I created using GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) an open source program much like Adobe PhotoShop®. I used them as wallpaper in buildings I made, and as fabrics for clothing, curtains, and pillows. Rocks, mountains and machines also had my images slapped on them. If you bought textures from Casita Gaia in Second Life®, those were textures I created.
Using these images more widely on the inter-webs means that I have something worth something. So rather than trying to turn these graphics into items for sale, I decided that I would use them in my own media and marketing efforts, and use them as image frames, meme-ish text backgrounds, and on occasion as plain old pretty images for my blog posts. To do this I need to watermark them, so it becomes more difficult for someone to lift them from my website or blog and use them.
As I said, I create images in GIMP. Love the product! But opening it and creating a transparent layer of the proper size to match and then overlay the various images and them batch processing them as new files takes more time than I want to spend. I knew there were lots of programs and apps that could do this, but I did not know of a specific one. I wanted to use the app on my desktop and laptop as that is where I access most of these textures for manipulation and not on one of my mobile devices as image manipulation on those just isn’t for these presbyopic eyes. So I scanned the apps in the App Store.
The Search
I searched the term “watermark.” A page that looked much like this one below resulted.
Some seemed too limited in scope. Some seemed too expensive. Some had rotten reviews or no reviews. Some were version 1.o.
I knew what I wanted; I’d been thinking about what I needed to do and how I wanted to do it for months upon months. So it was simple to eliminate the ones that did way too much, or that did not focus on watermarking. I already had a great image manipulation program. I wanted something just for watermarking. Anything without a review will not get my purchase; if someone wants me to beta test they are way off the mark they should ask for beta testers before marketing the app. Then I clicked on one with lots of good reviews that showed a $2.99 price. This page then came up.
It had a clever icon. I liked that… a lot. It also had a simple descriptive title. The reviews were well written, quite different and told me that people who had wanted to do what I wanted to do with my images sincerely like the app.
I did a quick search on the company, and it showed a legit company with a track record.
The Sale
The price was right. And the marketing of the price was right. In the image above you might be able to see the line just after the title that reads: ***** Limited -Time Special Offer!!! Regular Price: $18.99 ***** I am such a sucker for a bargain. The “reduced” price did it for me. I saw that and the purchase was made before I could stop myself, if I had wanted to stop.
PHOTO WATERMARK Wins My Approval
Intuitive, simple, effective. What more could I want? It did what it promised. It was easy. I have the products I wanted.
- I opened the app.
- I clicked add files and chose one of my textures. I repeated this until I had a bunch of images showing in the white work space below the active image area.
- I clicked on the text button on the upper right and then took my cursor and dragged a box over space on the image where I wanted text to appear and typed my text.
- Then I highlighted the text and clicked on the font button and selected a font and color, then I scaled and aligned the text box.
- I highlighted all the images in the white lightbox below the working area and made sure the one image I had typed text on was showing in the work active space and then selected the light blue “Apply to All” button.
- Then I pressed save and a save popup box appeared and I created a new folder and selected the type of file I wanted – .png or .jpg were the choices I remember.
- Then this resulted:
I’m a happy camper. I don’t know if I would have paid $18.99 for this. Probably not, I am cheap. But I am very happy with the products! I suspect there are many bloggers out there who would love the ease and effectiveness of this product.
As you can see, the watermarks do appear on different size images. I was able to alter individual marks after the watermark was applied to all the images to adjust location and such but before I saved them.
Photo Watermark by Ifunia gets my vote, and I haven’t even tested out a bunch of the functions of the the app. This company creates apps for both Windows and Macs so if Photo Watermark is not yet available for your PC, keep checking.
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I received no compensation for this review. I simply wrote about a product I purchased and liked.