Watermark reads the actual picture and gives back a placement plan — where the mark goes on this frame, at what size and opacity, and why there rather than the corner everybody uses.
Nothing opens in this browser — this one takes a job and does the work on our own graphics cards in Oregon. The free allowance below is how you try it: 30 frames, no card and no payment, on the key you are issued.
It does not burn the mark in and it does not do video. You get the plan and the exact command, and you run it, having read it.
The problem
A mark in the bottom-right corner survives until somebody drags a crop box, which takes two seconds and happens before your still is re-posted on an aggregator with your name gone. Putting it in the middle ruins the picture. The actual answer is different for every frame — it depends on where the subject is, where the flat areas are, and what a crop would have to sacrifice to remove it — and nobody works that out per still.
The placement is read off this picture, not off a template. A frame with the subject hard left and a frame with the subject centred get different answers, because a crop attacking each one has to cut something different.
Every placement comes with what a crop would have to remove to take the mark off. That number is the point: a mark you can crop out for free is decoration, and one that costs the subject's face is a deterrent.
Watermark hands you the plan and the command. It never touches your file, never produces an image, and has nothing of yours to lose.
The output is a plan and a command you read before you run. That is deliberate: a tool that writes into your masters is a tool that can ruin a shoot in one bad batch, and there is no undo for a flattened watermark. Video is a different problem with moving subjects and is not pretended at here.
How it works
The frames you are about to publish. They are read for placement and deleted when the job closes — there is no library on our side.
Position, size, opacity and rotation per frame, with the reason and the crop cost. Disagree with one and you have changed one line in a command rather than re-exported a batch.
The exact ImageMagick line is printed, per frame, on your machine, against your file. Nothing is executed for you, which means nothing is overwritten by surprise.
What it will never do
Everything irreversible about watermarking is on your side of the line on purpose. The program's whole job is to be the part that cannot destroy anything.
Pricing
A frame planned is a frame read for placement and given a plan. One that cannot be read comes back named and uncharged. Thirty are free on every key — enough for a listing set, and enough to see the crop cost on your current corner placement.
A listing set, and the crop cost on what you do now.
Everything you publish in a quarter.
A back catalogue of stills marked at last.
Flat per frame planned. Nothing here is priced against a takedown you win or a re-post you catch. Your licence key is emailed to you within two working days of payment.
Checkout is our own bitcoin server, not a card processor. The units you buy are added to your key: buy from the Buy more box inside the program and they arrive on their own once the payment confirms, or buy here and paste the invoice number from your receipt into that box.
Questions
It stops the casual re-post, which is most of them, and it gives you something to point at in a takedown.
It does not stop somebody determined. What this program changes is the arithmetic: a mark that costs the subject's face to remove gets left on far more often than one in the corner, and that is a measurable difference rather than a promise.
Because a bad batch is unrecoverable and there would be no way for you to have caught it first.
Printing the command means you read the placement before a thousand masters are flattened. It is one extra step and it is the step that makes the tool safe to use on work you cannot re-shoot.
The plan is coordinates, size and opacity, which any editor can use — the command is a convenience, not the product.
The CSV is designed to be read by a person or fed to whatever batch tool you already run.
The length of the job, then they are gone. No library, no cache, no backup. Re-running a closed job means sending the frames again.
A key. One line of text, issued to you and shown exactly once — only its hash is kept here, so it cannot be looked up later and we could not tell you what yours is. Every key arrives with a free allowance already on it, which is the tier at the top of the pricing above, and the work starts the first time you send a job with that key on it.
Each job is metered in the unit named in the pricing, and a unit that fails — a file that will not read, a row the model held back — is not charged and is named in the job report rather than silently skipped. When an allowance runs out the next job is refused before any work starts, with the number it used printed on the refusal.
More units are bought in bitcoin. The checkout is a bitcoin server we run ourselves. Buy from the Buy more box inside the program and the units are added to your key on their own as soon as the payment confirms; buy from the plan buttons above and paste the invoice number from your receipt into that same box. Each payment adds its units once, to one key.
If the crop cost on your current corner placement is zero — and it will be — you have been publishing an unmarked picture with a logo on it.