News :: 15MR: Watermark Factory v2.55

Greetings and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Watermark Factory version 2.55 by Sibental, Inc.—An application to quickly apply a variety of watermarks, as well as batch resize, filters, format change, and more to images.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Watermark Factory allows you to add text or image watermark to any picture. Protect your copyrights or simply add comments and date stamps to any picture.

This useful program has beautiful and easy to use interface.

You will be able to process thousands of files in a few seconds.

It works with EXIF and IPTC information.

Also Watermark Factory allows converting images into various formats and batch file renaming.”

Quick Pros

• Feature set is massive; Cropping, resizing, effects, watermarks and more
• Interface easy to get around
• Watermarks in text and image formats
• Resulting files decent quality

Quick Cons

• Crashes a few pictures into the batch every time; Does it in numerous places
• No drag and drop support
• From what I’ve seen already, it can’t do do thousands of images in a few seconds; ‘You will be able to process thousands of files in a few seconds.’

Expansion

I was kind of excited at this application for the fact that I manage a photographer’s website who can do thousands of images in a single weekend. While I do use Gallery to aid in my upload and managing the photos for certain events, its watermark feature leaves something to be desired. With the promise of ‘thousands of files in a few seconds’ I was looking forward to seeing how well the application would work.

Upon launching this application, I was surprised to see such a simple layout of the application. The interface is very easy to use most of the time (besides a lack of drag and drop support,) and easy to get around. With the sheer level of features, it was going to cover almost everything I needed to do besides uploading in one package.

I grabbed a folder of about 130 images for a test run quickly produced from a Nikon D200. First I tried adding a tiled watermark, second copyright watermark, and resize the images to 640×480. About 11 images in during conversion, the whole application crashed. I thought that maybe I picked too many settings, so I tried a few more options, less and less, and it kept crashing. All the way down to a simple watermark only. I butchered out the file it seemed to be getting crashed on. This fixed it temporarily, until 5 pictures after where that one was it crashed again. I removed the offending image again, and ran again. 8 images after that one, it crashed again. I checked the crashing image in a few programs, and converted it in another program I had, and no issues at all.

I tossed that folder totally aside, and went for my personal camera images. I did a basic watermark and ran on a folder of 86 images. It ran through this time fine, but I noticed something; With a claim of thousands in seconds, I did not see anywhere near this speed, and I’m sitting on a fast system. I saw approximately 2-3 images every second. Even being fair, that’s still theoretically 5 minutes for a a thousand with a single watermark; No resizing or complex watermark or anything else. While it would still be faster than what I have now by far, if I have to concern myself with this application crashing part way through the batch each time, it is an issue. While I was disappointed with the speed claim, the resulting file quality was high enough quality for what this would be used for.

Final Verdict

While I was excited for this application and its sheer feature set, the crashing issue is a huge show-stopper for me. While the D200 could be producing bad jpegs, the fact that there is no issues in an assortment of other applications including similarly-featured applications, I would suspect there might be an issue with the application or how it looks at jpegs. That said, while it has a killer feature set and does result in great file quality, I do not know if I could risk having corrupt files or ending up having to switch applications every time this application crashed.

While for some it might be nice to try to see if you have issues with this application while it is free, I can’t personally recommend using this application due to a risk of losing images or dealing with bad batches. As for paying for $49.00 for this application; This might be a tad steep for amateurs, decent price range for professionals, if there wasn’t this show-stopping issue within the application.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, April 12, 2007