Ultra Fast Watermarking Software

SamirD

I have Irfanview and I used to use that for batch resize conversion before I started using smugmug. (Now I just set everything to upload and then go to sleep. :rofl)

Irfanview doesn't have a really good way to implement watermarking as it relies on the screen's color depth for applying the watermark, and requires the selection of the files via a gui interface. This makes it hard to massively batch the operation via distributed computing.

I'm looking for ultra-fast watermarking of something simple, like a transparent embossing. (At least until SM has a more customized watermarking system.) With over a thousand images a week that would need watermarking and uploading, I can't spend more than 30 minutes watermarking.

I would like to have watermarking so I can turn off image protection. My images are really just marketing for the main web site, with very few print purchases. By allowing people to download and distribute images, the name of the main web site gets out better than most other marketing methods. My old image publishing method before had this capability, but without any watermarks, thousands of images were basically just stolen, even though it clearly states in the Terms of Service on the web site that this is illegal. :wxwax

I don't any single fast computer, but I do have a small army of slower ones which I tie together in a network batch operation. But for most cases, that's only if the program allows command line operation.

Any suggestions for programs or methods are welcome.

flyingpylon

If you have a small army of computers networked, I'll assume you're a fairly technical user. You could probably do what you need with something like ImageMagick and distribute the load somehow.

Personally, I have written scripts in Photoshop CS2, Fireworks, and IMatch to do watermarking and other similar things. Those are desktop apps, but they allow you to run scripts either from the command line or from within the application.

SamirD

Unfortunately, running unix is out of the question since everything I have is windows based. I've been basically writing batch files that take advantage of the logic "if not exist FILENAME do whatever" that exists in the DOS IF command. You can tell the army of systems each to attack a certain task with the "if it's not already done, work on it" logic. This way, you can scale infinitely and get 100% of the power of the systems in the army as they work on each element in your task list.

The problem is finding applications that can work this way, especially with older hardware/software combinations. I may just have to bite the bullet and get a new computer that's much faster, but how fast can 3.2mb jpegs be watermarked? If that's still not going to be quick enough then this isn't the way to solve the problem.