I've been looking at digital watermarking of my company's product images for a website renewal project. Are any of these services like DigiMarc worth the bother or expense?
My images are often taken and used by Chinese and Indian knock-off companies selling similar products, but otherwise they aren't likely to be used by the public. We aren't making money off the images, but it's a bit of a time suck to figure out who is using our images and then to prove it, and get them taken down.
Anyone have experience with this sort of technology?
Talk to RC - he's the king of watermarking images.
RC?
i never used digimarc, waaaay too expensive
as for image overlay watermarking, afaik. all it did was p##s me off that so many jerks stole the pix that i spent so much time stealing. no, really, i had a lot of orig pix of beaches, etc. that got ripped WITH watermark
that said, g image search has changed and isn't -imo- going to provide the ctr that it used to, so if you have a compelling set of pix it might be worthwhile but i wouldn't bother for routine stuff.
image overlay can be auto-done serverside with php and a logo does make it easier to spot the pirates
You're talking about visible watermarks, right? It's not too hard to run a batch file with PhotoShop to do that I guess. However, I liked the DigiMarc method that seems to use a form of steganography to imbed the watermark so that it's not visible. Is there a way to do that?
What were you using in PHP to watermark images?
right, visible
>php
used to be a class. i hacked some code. looks to be mainstream now
ex: http://www.codeforest.net/add-watermark-on-image-using-php
it's been years but i think digimarc was selling the ability to scan the web and find all the stolen pix, right? that's why it was so expensive.
btw, you can put text in the binary in the iptc or exif fields but it's easy to strip.
> DigiMarc
Yeah, DigiMarc tracks the images for you and lets you know when they're being used. They must have their own crawler or something.
> PHP
Interesting. I fear I'd get a lot of complaints about the aesthetics of placing a visible watermark on images. I shall have to discuss that with the designer muckymucks.
> text in the binary
Ooh. Forgot about that. I should be doing that anyway. I'm going to get that added into the CMS. Thanks!!
>muckymucks
Run the numbers on what digimarc would cost for your product line and give the higher level management a reality check. The visible watermark doesn't have to be much in order to help you spot it on image search. I ended up just using a domain name in text in the lower righthand corner. Done right, good font choice, rtc., it looks ok and very businesslike.
>exif
Set all image lon/lat to your headquarters as proof of ownership. For some reason, geo coordinates don't seem to get strpped as much.
> reality check
I know what is likely to happen...I'll be running batch files to update the exif data in all of our images...
Thanks for that long./lat. idea. I'll definitely implement that regardless of whether DigiMarc sees a penny (yen).
>I'll be running batch files to update the exif data
php can read/write to the iptc/exif fields.
I once wrote a galley that packed all the page content and some parts of the template into the individual image's iptc. It used BB code to get around the special character limitations within the iptc fields. You can manipulate your image guts pretty easily with php. I haven't done anything with it in 5 years but php was adding tons of image-handling code even back then.
I'm a PHP lightweight. I'm going to instruct the CMS monkeys to add something to manipulate all image files' iptc/exif fields to add the basic image meta data to include the company name, a copyright, and to slip in that lat./long. idea of yours as well. Thanks!