Is there a quick way to watermark a number of pictures automatically?

[ch_123]

I need to watermark some of the pictures that I'm using in the IBM Wiki. I'm sure there's some software out there that can be used to automate this task (especially considering that the pictures are pretty much all the same size). I'd prefer a Linux-based solution, but a Windows one would probably just as good.

[timw4mail]

It would be fairly easy to do with a Photoshop macro, but I don't know if the GIMP has macro support or not.

[bitflipper]

Here are some freeware Windows image processing utilities that might do the trick. I have no experience with any of them, though. The first one, Modi, states it operates on batches of images.

[Mnemonix]

You could use ImageMagick for this. A quick Google search for "imagemagick watermark" spit out this one.
There's also Netpbm, which is similar.

[ch_123]

Just so you know (I know this is for Brandon and possibly others and I respect their wishes), my pics on geekhack are all in the public domain and you may butcher and take credit for them (please do, I am not a very good photographer).

Thanks. Brandon was the one who wanted the watermarking. He supposedly has had problems with people stealing his pics for use with ebay listings, and then people have emailed him thinking that he was responsible for their crapped out board.

[hyperlinked]

Yeah, there are many easy ways of doing this on a Linux server. GD2 and ImageMagick are probably the two most common ways to build a watermark on a Linux server.

If ther server has PHP installed, GD2 should already be running. GD2 functions are built into PHP an if you know PHP at all, GD2 is very easy to use from within a PHP script.

If you're looking for a command line option, ImageMagick seems to be a more popular method for processing images on a server.

[hyperlinked]

Brandon = Majestouch?

If it's for his site, you might just be better off watermarking the image manually in Photoshop or scripting it in Photoshop if you already know how to do Photoshop scripting. Unless we're talking hundreds of images or more, by the time you figure out how to script the watermark, you'll probably have spent more time than you would have doing it the "dumb" way.

Even if you script everything quickly from the start, you may find yourself needing tweaks to improve the output fidelity or color control. There are a lot of things that can screw up doing these watermarks.

[ch_123]

Brandon = ClickyKeyboards.com guy

When I said a Linux solution, I meant an image editing application as opposed to a server application, as the pics will be hosted on GeekHack.

Thanks for the advice though!

[Mnemonix]

When I said a Linux solution, I meant an image editing application as opposed to a server application, as the pics will be hosted on GeekHack.

That's OK, ImageMagick will run happily from the command line in an xterm, not somewhere on a remote server. The second link from my other post points to a snippet of shell script that will most probably solve your problem (the for-loop at the bottom). Copy and paste it into a text file, adapt it to your needs, make it executable, and run it.

[o2dazone]

I do all my massive watermarking in Wordpress (**** you not, it's got great control). I save them out as 100% jpgs. I then pull them off my FTP and run them through Adobe Fireworks because it does a great job compressing jpgs (and a horrible job watermarking, go figure). I mostly need things like 5x5 pixels away from the bottom right corner, this is something that Fireworks has trouble doing. It's possible to do this in Photoshop, but it does a horrible job compressing jpgs

oh btw, the Wordpress module is called NextGen Gallery

[Hofy]

Gimp.  Link.

Lightroom 3 will also  do it but $$$.


Edit: Just read the article - ridiculously labor intensive though.  Don't know if Gimp has Photoshop  like droplet capability.

LR 3 is free right now.  Only because it is beta.  Release isnt until next year.

of course this watermark was done in LR2

[hyperlinked]

It's possible to do this in Photoshop, but it does a horrible job compressing jpgs

If you're surprised to see jpgs that are 200k for a small icon, then you have to "Save For Web" instead of doing a "Save As" when you save your jpgs.

[o2dazone]

I've been using Photoshop for 10 years. I know the difference Photoshops JPG compressor is just horrible

here's a good article on it if you're interested.

At my company were doing a big project where were improving the performance of our site, using non semantic approaches to eek out improvements everywhere we can. We're shaving our images down by about 15% using Fireworks to save out images, and then using Smush.It to get a little bit more after that. Works great if you have high traffic websites

[hyperlinked]

I've been using Photoshop for 10 years. I know the difference Photoshops JPG compressor is just horrible

here's a good article on it if you're interested.

Thanks for passing that along. i never knew that Photoshop was inefficient at compressing jpgs.

When you said it was horrible at compressing jpgs, I assumed you must have been making the common "Save As" mistake... all a matter of semantics. I think of disatrous performance when someone describes something as horrible instead of a 10% difference.

[o2dazone]

Haha sorry, I shouldn't have said horrible. In fact, unless I'd be getting a lot of views to any imagery, I just use the Save For Web feature for my jpgs in Photoshop.