Watermark placement by photo

rokzmom

Is there any way to apply watermarks on a photo by photo basis as opposed to an entire gallery inside smugmug? There is no way to say that the watermark always looks best in one particular position on every photo. I have set up four positions from which to choose placement for my watermark, but have not found a consistently reliable way to apply them to individual photos--I tend to forget whether I've applied a watermark to a particular photo when I'm doing it from the <tools, more, watermarking> option within a gallery and find myself either applying a watermark several times to certain shots and then completely missing other shots since all shots within a gallery are displayed each time, regardless of whether the watermark has already been applied.

I'm hoping there is an easy solution to this that I'm just not seeing!
Thanks in advance,
Anne

SteveM

Hi Anne,

There isn't a way to go through and watermark individual photos. For a lot of purposes, it would be ideal to have a full image preview and apply watermarks one by one. I also used to make use of 4 watermarks, one for every corner position. The way I would do this would be to use Tools>Watermarking, and set say the upper right watermark to be applied. I'd then go through all the thumbnails and select all the photos that would look best with an upper left watermark, then I'd apply it. I'd then go through and mark the photos to use the next watermark, say bottom left, lather, rinse, repeat.

This is pretty cumbersome, so now I would only consider this method for my portfolio, or something very special. Through years of therapy, I'm now down to just two watermarks - one for horizontal, one for vertically oriented photos. For this, I go into my gallery settings that I'll be uploading to, and choose the first watermark to apply, lets say landscape. I use Lightroom, which has a great feature to sort via aspect ratio, which separates all the portrait versus landscape photos. I select all of my landscape photos, and upload. Voila! Magically applied. I then do the same, changing the gallery setting to apply my portrait watermark, and upload the rest.

This could work for the 4-watermark setup as well, but sorting would be a bit more difficult in that you'd have to use some type of star rating, color tagging, or keyword tagging in your image program, but it can still work! Just like a good paint job, a professional end result starts with the preparation. Whether you use Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, Picasa, iPhoto, or the hundreds of other image programs, almost all of them have some type of tagging, sorting, or rating system. All you need is four choices, and the ability to sort or filter the results. Go through the photos you plan on uploading, view them one at a time, and 'mark' them somehow, depending on where you'd like the final watermark placement. How you 'mark' them depends on the program you're using. Then, sort by that 'mark', set your gallery watermarking, and drag and drop using the Simple Uploader.

I hope this helps, Anne!

rokzmom

Thanks for the suggestion to pre-sort the photos and apply the watermark based upon that upload--I can definitely make that work! At least that way I'm not going through a gallery and writing down which location and doing multiple selects, and re-selects, etc...

Perhaps at some time in the future I will be able to let go of my *ahem* anal-retentive tendencies and whittle down my number of necessary sorts... Can you recommend a good therapist?!

Thanks again, Steve!

rokzmom

Okay, one more question related to this topic. I'm still in the designing phase of starting up my business and completely re-designed my logo (and hence my watermarks) since starting out. There is now a rather long list of watermarks from which I get to choose when doing my watermarking. Is there any way to delete the old options? I have deleted the files that I used to make those watermarks from my smugmug gallery, but the options are still showing up in my drop-down list.

Thanks in advance!

Allen

rokzmom wrote: »

Okay, one more question related to this topic. I'm still in the designing phase of starting up my business and completely re-designed my logo (and hence my watermarks) since starting out. There is now a rather long list of watermarks from which I get to choose when doing my watermarking. Is there any way to delete the old options? I have deleted the files that I used to make those watermarks from my smugmug gallery, but the options are still showing up in my drop-down list.

Thanks in advance!

Go to the watermark page in your control panel and delete the non-needed ones there.

http://www.apzphotography.com/homepage/watermarks.mg

rokzmom

Thank you, Allen!!! I knew there was something relatively simple that I just wasn't seeing.