That being said, watermarking your images can be a tremendous pain, especially if you have a large volume of images or are constantly creating new ones. The best solution to this has been to integrate watermarking into your workflow and photographers have been doing that for years with Photoshop and other editing programs. Likewise, several photo sharing sites have also integrated watermarking into their services, including deviantART, making it virtually hands free.

But what about bloggers? To that end sverde1 has created a WordPress entitled “Watermaks Reloaded” that aims to add watermarking to your blogging workflow. But how well does it work and is it worth the energy? I decided to install it and find out.

Testing Watermark Reloaded

The basics of Watermark Reloaded is fairly simple. Once you install the plugin, which can be easily installed via the WordPress backend since it is in the official directory, you simply configure the options for the plugin and go.

Among the options you can set which image sizes get the watermark, where it appears on the image (including the margin) and the text/formatting of the watermark.

All in all, it takes a few seconds to set up and run but, once your options are configured, all the images up upload to your blog automatically have your watermark attached to it.

To that end, you can see a sample of a watermarked image above as all the images that I’ve embedded in this post used the plugin.

But while there is no doubt that the plugin is easy to install and set up, the question is whether its worthwhile and that one is a bit more difficult to answer.

Is Watermark Reloaded Worthwhile?

To be clear, Watermark Reloaded does everything it says it will do, but the options are minimalist and the plugin may not be right for many WordPress users.

For one, there’s no way to turn the plugin off on specific images (something that’s on the “to do list” for the plugin). This means if your site uses a mix of original and stock images, you probably want to pass as you don’t want to watermark images you don’t own.

Second, the plugin doesn’t do any “sanity checking” to make sure that the watermark will fit on the image, producing watermarks like the one to the right, where the mark is too big for the image (also on the “to do list”).

Finally, the watermark itself is fairly inflexible. Users only get to choose the text, the font, the size and the color of the mark. There is no ability to use a logo, set a transparency or set up the watermark to change based on the image (IE: White watermark on black background and vice versa)

Still, if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to do a simple watermark on all of your WordPress images, this may be the WordPress plugin for you.

Bottom Line

Personally, I’ll be uninstalling this plugin once this review is done. While it hasn’t caused any problems I don’t have any use for watermarking every image on PT, especially since so many are stock images.

That being said, there are some photobloggers and artists out there that might find this plugin very useful and, for those, I definitely want to recommend it. Just bear in mind that it is much more limited than other watermarking tools, though it will save time and help guarantee nothing goes online without a mark.

However, I have to wonder if it makes more sense to integrate watermarking into the blogging workflow or the photography workflow. I would think for most it should be the latter but for some, this approach may well make sense.

Though it might seem like something of a novelty, the ability for users to search for “purple flower” or “red car” might have an unintended side effect, enabling photographers and artists to better search for copies of their work online.

With most current photo searche engines based solely upon tagging and words around the image, there are very few techniques to effectively search for duplicates of an image on the Web. Searching for the file name, for example, is one possibility, but it is easily defeated by simply renaming the file before re-uploading it.

Though FeelImage, in its current incarnation, is only a minor step forward, it is already being used by some artists, including the Ripped Art Task Force, to track down copied images.

Other visual artists may find it just as useful.

Usage

The idea behind using FeelImage is pretty straightforward. If you have an image that is often stolen or you suspect might be, simply search for the color (or time) and a description of what is in the image. FeelImage, in a few moments, will pull up a list of photos similar to the one you describe. From there, it is easy to browse and look for any exact copies of your image.

It is important to note though that, when using FeelImage, that the color detection is automated and, thus, not perfect. If you have a picture of a red car that is set against a blue sky, FeelImage will likely read most of the image as being blue and it might not show up well on a search for “Red Car” but will show up higher on “Blue Car”.

Furthermore, FeelImage works best with photos and images that are of one subject and, for the most part, one color. The more complicated the image is, the less likely FeelImage will accurately describe it.

Of course, these are not FeelImage’s only limitations. The service is very new and it is important to be aware that it is still a work in progress. Thus, its search comes with a few caveats.

Limitations

FeelImage, as its logo indicates, is only an alpha release. It is not feature complete and has many bugs in it.

The greatest limitation is that FeelImage only searches for photos on three photo services, Photozou, Zorg and Flickr.

Though Flickr is a very popular photo hosting service and is used to display images on many different sites, it is not the only image hosting service on the Web by any stretch. Photos hosted by Imagecshack, Photobucket and others will go undetected.

Second, the object information seems to be based upon the tags that the user supplies with the photos. Though the color detection seems to work automatically, perhaps to a fault, FeelImage has to look at the tags to determine what it is a photo of. Though creating a system to do that automatically would be virtually impossible, the reliance on user-submitted input, in this case a plagiarist, is a definite weakness.

Finally, since the service is still in a pre-release phase, the results are not as accurate as they could be. It is clear that the developers are still working on the software that runs the search engine as, in some searches, the first few pages of results are almost completely irrelevant. Some searches, however, work better than others and it is important to play around with modified searches to see what results you get.

Still, these limitations should not stop artists from at least experimenting with FeelImage. Not only can it be used to detect plagiarism, but its intended use, finding similar images based upon color and time, is a very interesting feature that produces some unexpected results.

It is a great tool and it will be interesting to see how it grows.

Conclusions

Image plagiarism is easily the hardest to detect. Though tools are available to monitor such infringements, they are generally out of the reach of your average blogger or amateur artist.

FeelImage represents only a small step forward in detecting image plagiarism but it is an important one. It finally gets through the use of text and tags and looks into the image itself for clues. This can help narrow down the search results and increase the likelihood that the image you want is at the top of the results.

Despite its severe limitations, at least at this time, it is an important site for artists, photographers and others who post images to be aware of.

Not only is it a powerful tool today, but it could easily grow into something much greater and provide an even bigger boost to artists in the future. It will definitely be a service to follow.