Watermarks on thumbnails?!?!

Lostnomore

In Account Settings -> Watermarks, even though I choose "Small" for Smallest Size for a particular watermark, I see my watermark appear over the thumbnails of these images on my homepage and on a gallery homepage. Why is this when I did NOT select the smallest size to be "Thumb"?

Also, once I change a watermark option in Account Settings (ex. Smallest Size, or Fade, or whatever), why do I have to manually re-apply the watermark to all images gallery by gallery? I should be able to make the change in Account Settings and the change should be automatically applied to each gallery that uses that particular watermark.

Very frustrating, and I hope that fixes are made soon.

thenickdude

The issue is that actual "thumbnail" size images are almost never used on New SmugMug (these are at most 150x150 pixels large). What's normally used when a "thumbnail" is required are full-size images like Small and Medium.

mrneutron

Yes that is the case. New SmugMug does not use the thumbnail size very often so set your watermark to large or above. You must re-apply the watermarks after you make a change so it's applied to all the display copies. Images you upload after you make the change will be affected but existing photos must be watermarked again to apply the new setting to the display copies.

Lostnomore

I sure wish, then, that an option could be added to allow one to decide whether or not to show a watermark on the Small images of the homepage or a gallery homepage, but to still show them on individual images once clicked on. I want to watermark Small images, but to not have them show on the Small images used on these homepages. Hope this makes sense.

thenickdude

No, that doesn't make any sense. The purpose of a watermark is to ensure that your image will be protected even if downloaded from your site. If someone wants to steal a small image, they could just take it from the unwatermarked thumbnail instead of from the watermarked gallery. Because of that, I really doubt SmugMug would ever implement a system like what you describe.

Lostnomore

So as not to make my homepages look ugly, I chose Medium as the smallest size to watermark. So I clicked on an individual photo, chose to view the Small size (i.e. not watermarked), then took a screenshot just of the image. Ended up being about 400x270 pixels. So people wanting to insert a free photo of decent resolution into a report or on a web page with no reference are able to do so without paying OR knowing the source. That leaves me no choice but to choose my watermark to be on Small as the smallest size and deal with my deliberately 'busy' watermark on my homepage images. I'm beginning to wonder if another service would have offered me more flexibility (and willingness to accept suggestions and ideas for improvement) in this regard.

EDIT: My apologies for being so frustrated with this situation, but I needed a place to vent and I figured this might be the right place. Thanks for putting up with my venting. I'll find another work-around to this problem.