Update and Watermark Software Shootout

Hey folks,
Well it feels like it’s been just about forever since I’ve posted much. That’s kind of because, well it has. So, quickly, things I’ve been meaning to let you all know about:

• Took the Altima into the shop last week to sort out the bumper situation.
• I got a rental car, paid for by insurance. Due to a lack of availability at Enterprise’s rental agency, I ended up driving around a 2004 Cadillac Deville! It’s a boat on land, let me tell you. But the quietest boat you’ll ever set foot in. How I wish my Altima were so quiet. The lowered road noise also helped me hear the stereo more clearly (which was also much better than the Altima’s).
• Watched the surreal Spirited Away on Wed; near the end a little slow but highly creative and well worth the watch… like a Japanese “Alice in Wonderland” but a unique and interesting story all unto itself.
  
• Watched the comedy Old School Thu, ended up enjoying it much more than I thought I was going to. Don’t be thrown by the blowup doll on the cover, which ends up playing a very minor role. Will Ferrell carries the movie without question. “We’re streaking!”
  
• Got the Altima back Friday — all shiny and new again!

• Saturday morning, Cam, Darren, Alec and I all piled into the Altima and headed an hour north for a big day of disc at the 12th Annual All-Faiths Hat Tournament. Cam’s done a great writeup of the day; I’ll be posting a few more pics from it soon.

Which brings me to today’s little bit. With the rise of SarasotaUltimate.com, I’m probably going to start contributing photos. However, if I’m not hosting the images myself, how can I maintain at least some notion of copyright? How about stamping them somehow? Yeah, that sounds good.
After staring at VersionTracker‘s search field for a few minutes this morning trying to figure out what to look for, I finally punched in “watermark” and voila. About a half-dozen hits. I looked at the two top-rated programs, PictureTheBatch and EasyBatchPhoto.
Both programs offer the ability to resize, rotate, and add watermarks to photos, and both process large batches of files with relative ease. Although PictureTheBatch has a nicer user interface (EasyBatchPhoto is all brushed metal, yecch!) and allows one to enter plain text as a watermark (handy if you need many different watermarks), EasyBatchPhoto facilitates my workflow better, prompting me for the name of a new folder to hold the watermarked images soon as I drop a group of files onto it. By default EasyBatchPhoto creates said folder on my Desktop (modifiable and stored in an easily selectable “recent places” pulldown menu). In contrast, although it allows you to choose a different destination folder, PictureTheBatch assumes you’ll be placing the watermarked pictures in the same folder as the originals:

But don’t forget to check one of the “Options for New Files”, or you’ll see this:

How annoying! Why allow this to occur in the first place?
In terms of output file formats, PictureTheBatch wins the sheer numbers game:

…but EasyBatchPhoto has all the important ones:

In addition, unlike PictureTheBatch, EasyBatchPhoto is not a brand new product, so it’s more likely to be mature (it’s had 23 releases since the first version of it came out in June last year, versus two releases for PictureTheBatch since April 29th 2004). When comparing the reviews of both products (PictureTheBatch, EasyBatchPhoto), EasyBatchPhoto has several user comments to the effect that the developer is responsive. By contrast, the only user comment about PictureTheBatch looks like it was written by the developer. To be fair, PictureTheBatch has only been out a couple weeks, so we’ll see how things go shortly.
Whereas EasyBatchPhoto is a fully functional download, PictureTheBatch stamps an advertisement watermark for itself on your pictures until you register. At $18, EasyBatchPhoto is slightly cheaper than PictureTheBatch, which weighs in at $20 even.
The winner, for better workflow integration, product maturity, and demonstrated developer responsiveness: EasyBatchPhoto. I’m going to be using it to process the photos from Saturday’s frisbee tournament, I’ll let you know how it goes.