15-Minute Reviews :: WinWatermark v2.2

Today’s 15-Minute Review is on Winwatermark version 2.2 by WinWatermark.com – An application to add watermarks plus a few other basic manipulations to images.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“WinWatermark is a professional all in one image editing software. It helps you add text and image watermark to any pictures to protect them from unauthorized distribution. WinWatermark is not only watermarking tool, but rather useful and simple photos processor. You can personalize your photos using attractive frames, crop image size to meet you need, resize images with high quality, rotate and rename your pictures, and convert your images to other image formats.”

Quick Pros

• Relatively easy to use file-by-file or in batch
• Possesses some useful functionality
• Capability to change file formats
• Multiple text and image-based watermarks with save options

Quick Cons

• No drag and drop support
• Framing functionality limited
• Watermarking functionality could use some improvements
• While you can view EXIF info, no way to edit info
• Speed of loading images and processing somewhat slow

Expansion

Upon launching this application, you are greeted with a relatively easy-to-use application. On the left side of the window, you will find a preview pane with a series of buttons directly below it; Rotation left/right, Crop, Resize, Frame and Rename. Below this you will find the destination folder settings (Original folder or chosen destination folder). On the right side of the window you will find two tabs; Images and Watermarks. When you’ve added images, the image area shows up as a list with a small thumbnail, some file information (File name, format and resolution), and a series of small buttons on the right of each file; A close button to remove the file from the list, 4 arrows for quick rotation of the images, and EXIF information viewing. Below this window you will find buttons for adding folders and files, as well as removing images and clearing the entire list. The Watermarks tab is much like the Images tab, but allows you to apply multiple watermarks to all of the files in the Images list.

As mentioned above, there are a few features besides just watermarking. Most of the functions were built with batching in mind, so they are all for the most part decently controlled for a batch environment.

Crop and resize are fairly self-explanatory – Each with control over how images are accessed, as well as control over if you’d like to apply the settings to one or all of the files. There is control over absolute positioning, relative positioning and so forth, for that little extra control.

Rename isn’t the most powerful image file renamer out there, but it is powerful enough to do some use. With the ability to use substitutions of file name portions using one of 7 substitutions, you can be quite creative in your naming scheme – Great for those of you who dislike your camera’s naming scheme, and Windows image transfer service is too pathetic.

Framing is a good idea, its implementation is weak however; With very little control over how things look, you will likely find yourself disappointed with this aspect unless you want a stock rectangle picture frame on each image. There are more options available – However, the texturing frame mode offers mostly odd textures; the frame shape type does not seem to actually change the frame shape, just the image shape; And there isn’t much in the way of other settings other than sizing of lines.

There is also the capability to output your images in other formats as well, including JPEG, GIF, PNG, TGA and BMP – You’ll find this when you click to start the process. While there does not appear to be compression settings with the JPEG format, there does not appear to be a noticable degradation in image quality.

Watermarking is the final feature to touch on. This application does offer something a little different than most other watermarking programs, in that you are not limited to one text watermark and one image watermark. You can add as many as you want. There is many of the common options with the watermarks, including offsets, rotations, opacity as well as font settings. However, there is some left to be desired. There is no automatic watermark scaling based on the size of the image being applied to. With the text watermark, you can still set the font size but it does not dynamically change with the file resolution. The image watermark you are stuck with the original image size, so if you’re doing a series of thumbnails and full images, you’re likely to want to create two images for watermarking. Another weakness is the text styling – Besides choosing your font, some basic formatting (Bold, italic, underline and alignment), you are limited to a shadow, and a large box behind the text. This is definitely weaker than most other watermark applications previously tested – Most others offer strokes and better shadows to the text. With images, you have no styling options, leaving you again to have to pre-build an image with styling before porting it into this application.

While the application does allow you to view the EXIF information on the files, the EXIF functionality fell short; There is no way to alter the EXIF information in the application, or bulk changes to these, possibly incorporating the ability to time-shift the EXIF information like what Time Stamp Modifier for JPEG Files does.

During testing, there was no noticeable image quality depreciation in the resulting files. During loading of images, it was noted the process is on the slow side – 100 images took about a minute to load. Processing these images with two watermarks and a resize was a bit longer, taking about two and a half minutes to process. This wouldn’t be great for if you were working on thousands of images at a time, but for small collections, it isn’t too painful.

Final Verdict

While the application for the most part does function, it does feel almost thrown together to jump into a market quickly. The quality of the watermark and framing functionality will leave many wanting more or better. For free however, if you are in the market for a watermarking application (And haven’t jumped on the numerous Giveaways in the past), this may suffice enough for your needs, but be aware of the applications potential short-comings. As for paying $29.90 for this title; Unfortunately this application could not be recommended in its current state for this price. This application may be more apt for freeware to drive visits for other products or maybe $5 to $10 for those on a budget; There is just so many other applications out there for $20-$30 with the same or more punch.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, February 29, 2008