What is Visual Watermarking?
Visual Watermarking is the process of superimposing (overlaying) an image and text atop an image or video file.
.. And what is it not?
Visual Watermarking is not to be confused with hidden or invisible watermarking. This is not encrypted and does not provide protection against theft or the reverse engineering of the hard watermark (removing or blurring out).
What problems does this solve?
Identify source/ownership of assets. Helps with copyright. Provides content owners better protection of the assets that they own.
Distinguish assets that are still work in progress, requiring approval or requiring confidentiality.
Enhances distribution of content that is sensitive or paid because of an easier way to identify ownership.
Could be an added benefit for marketing and branding of digital assets and create awareness.
Can be extended to more creative uses in the future to indicate status of documents/files with custom terms to keep work organized.
Setting up Visual Watermarking in Edisen
Setting up Visual Watermarking in Edisen will follow this user journey
Step 1: Setting up your Organization's Watermarking Preferences
Who has access to this section?
If you are the admin of an organization, you will have access to this section.
There are two main parts for setting up preferences:
Setup Watermark image
Login as Admin
Go to Settings from Left Navigation
Go to Preferences tab
Scroll down to Watermark settings
Upload a .png to be used as image overlay. A transparent image is recommended. See the screenshot below for the setup.
This image is used at 50% opacity and is overlayed on the center.
You can update your watermark by choosing an alternative PNG, or remove the watermark on the top right of the section, click "Reset Watermarking Settings"
Setup Watermarking with User Information
After you upload an image above, scroll down to setup User Information to be used as Watermark.
Note that it is required to set up an image prior to this.
Also note that user information only appears on downloading from Share (when Shared from a Collection where Watermarking is enabled) as a "hard watermark". It does not appear on Previews.
When User Email is toggled on:
For anonymous shares, this is the email address of the person sharing if we don't know the login of the person requesting the download.
However, if this person is logged in to Edisen and is making a download request from the share, we will use this person's user email (and not the sharer's).
For email (unique) shares, we will show email of the person accessing from that unique link and downloading.
When User IP is toggled on:
It would be the IP address of the person downloading from the Share.
When Download Timestamp is toggle on:
It would be the timestamp of the download request on the Share.
Watermark Positions: you can select one or more positions on the image/video where you want to see the User Information.
Click on Save.
Step 2: Enable Watermarking at a Collection Level
Once the Watermark preferences have been setup in your organization, you can choose to turn on or off Watermarking on a Collection, by opening the context menu.
Who has permission to set this for a Collection?
Owners of the Collection or Admins in an organization will have permission to enable or disable this option.
Step 3: Previewing and downloading from within the Collection
When you enable watermarking for a collection, any images/videos Previewing will have the watermark image.
At this time, we do not support full-screen preview on Watermarked assets.
Note that any downloads from the Collection, while within the collection, will not be watermarked.
Step 4: Sharing from the Collection and previewing, downloading from the Share
Sharing:
When you are a Guest or Member in an organization or an Editor or Viewer at the Collection level and sharing from the Collection, all the Share links will have Watermarking enabled by default (no option presented on the Share modal).
When you are an Admin in an organization or an Owner at the Collection level sharing from the Collection, you will have the ability to disable Watermarking while sharing (on the Share modal).
On the Share page:
Assets can be shared from different Collections and each Collection could have Watermarking enabled or not. Eg; while sharing from a Basket.
Previewing any assets which belong to a Collection where Watermarking is enabled will show the preview with the Watermark image overlay.
While downloading any assets which belong to a Collection where Watermarking is enabled, the assets will be first processed by the transcoder in the background to get "hard watermarked" and then will be made available to the user for download.
Note that the status of any background processing like Watermarking that's in progress on the Share page will be shown on the Activity panel.
When Watermarking with User Information is enabled, based on the preferences setup, the text with User Information is "hard watermarked" on download.
Limitations
For .jpeg image file types on which watermark image is overlayed, the maximum resolution is 5000x5000.
For .png image file types on which watermark image is overlayed, the maximum resolution is 1500x1500.
Any images beyond this resolution will be compressed/shrunk to within the supported resolution, while keeping the same aspect ratio.
There are no known limits to the watermark image other than the .png file type.