Technobiography

Bulk Watermark Photographs - FastStone Image Viewer

Last night, it took me almost an hour to search for an easy way to put watermarks on my tons of photos at http://photos.edongskey.com .

In particular, I was looking for an easy way to do a Bulk Watermark for photos.  There are many softwares that can do this. But as usual, I was looking for the one that was free and did not have any nags. I didn’t want trial versions that had additional un-wanted watermarks of the software name. I didn’t want trial versions that had limited functionality. I didn’t want free software that could possibly have some trojans in them.

And I found FastStone Image Viewer! It works perfectly for my purposes. I am able to add watermarks on hundreds of photos.

Here’s how I add watermarks for photos that are *already* uploaded on my webserver.

a.) Download the photos from webserver unto my hard drive using my FTP client. I use FileZilla because of the same criteria I used for Faststone (Free, not trial nags, no trojans, full functionality).

b.) Add watermark using FastStone. Select Photos > F3 (Bulk Convert) >  Advanced Options > Text … (then set your watermark).

c.) Save the watermarked images on my hard drive.

d.) Upload watermarked images to my webserver using FTP

I chose to un-check “rename” when I Bulk Convert. This is so that the exact names of the photos are used when I upload the watermarked photos — this preserves all links to the old photos.

Also, I un-check the “Keep original Date / Time attributes”. Thus, after watermarking, the image’s date modified is changed to today. This helps me keep track of which of the 1 thousand photos on my server are already watermarked (Answer: the ones with dates modified lately).

Hope that’s useful.

ka edong
holding water