Freshly Squeezed Reviews: Leave your mark

Posted by Frank Petrie May 24, 2006 at 8:19am

If you’re a listener of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, then you are probably familiar with his recent legal trouble. A picture that he had recently posted of his daughter on Flickr, wound up in a European tabloid. They never asked his permission to use that picture. And if you place your photos online with something like iWeb, you’re in the same boat. So, what can you do to protect yourself from intellectual property theft?

Script Software declares, “Watermark is the worlds No. 1 watermarking application for Mac and Windows. Stylishly Copyright all your images in just minutes. ... iWatermark is integrated to work with Photoshop, ACDSee, iPhoto, Cumulus, Portfolio, PhotoStation, iView and other photo organizers.”

What was once (hopefully) a digital utopia is devolving into business as usual. So, you have to protect yourself. Will iWatermark, which costs US$20, do it?

The Juice

Drag-n-drop installation. (it’s a fav around my house.) iWatermark reads the following image formats: JPEG, TIFF, PNG, Photoshop (Requires Quicktime), PICT (Macintosh Only),  and BMP. Writable formats:  JPEG,  PNG, PICT (Macintosh Only),  BMP (Windows Only), and TIFF.

There is a ton of batch editing features here, too. You can watermark entire folders of images at once, scale all your images to be the same size, create thumbnails of your watermarked images, use text, TIFF or PNG logos for your watermarks. iWatermark can also be used to convert your file’s format.

The Rind

Nada.

The Pits

Nada.

The Pulp

Script Software’s iWatermark delivered on all of it’s promises without fail. The one problem that I have (and it would appear to be true of the other visible watermark software) is that I can change the meta data in any file once I have accessed the information. If that’s the case, where’s my protection?

Now, I can hear some photographers pulling their hair out. I am not an avid photographer. If the mood strikes me, fine. If it doesn’t, fine. So, in the comments section, would those of you immersed in digital photography set me and the rest of us lay people straight?

Thanks. We’ll put you on our Christmas card list.

System requirements: Mac OS 10.3 or higher.

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10

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