Photo Watermark Size

[Elder Raman]

Thereis truth in the saying a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes I wonder if that is enough, no pun intended, to give you the whole picture. Burn into that image the date and time when the photo was taken, the geographic coordinates of that location or some other critical information, and the value of that picture is now multiplied. That will make your photo be worth a few more than one thousand words, and most importantly, give you the whole picture.

In the Street Service Report survey example in the right side, you will appreciate that the photo taken from Survey123 automatically includes the Job ID as well as the date and time when the photo was taken.

Many field data collection workflows can benefit from photo watermarking. Asset inspections, damage assessments or code violation reports are good examples. For an asset inspection, you may want to burn into the photo the unique identifier and status of the asset. In a damage assessment or while documenting a code violation, you can use watermarks to carry the location, time and name of the inspector or team that shot the photo.

Starting with version 3.5, the Survey123 field app has built-in photo watermarking capabilities. As you will learn through this article, you can create watermark expressions to add date, time, location and user information into your photos. You can even dynamically set the content of your watermarks with data previously entered in your smart form. Survey123 watermark expressions give you a great deal of flexibility to control the placement and display properties of your watermarks. All it takes is a bit of XLSForms magic.

To configure a survey with photo watermarking capabilities, you need to design your survey with Survey123 Connect. Survey123 Connect is a desktop application used to author Survey123 projects following the XLSForm specification. With XLSForms you define the questions and behavior of your smart form in Microsoft Excel (following the XLSForms syntax). XLSForm files are then published as Survey123 forms into ArcGIS with Survey123 Connect. If you are not familiar with Survey123 Connect and XLSForms, I suggest you start with our XLSForms video tutorials in YouTube, or with our step by step XLSForm guides.

The above will add a watermark with the text Bula World in the lower-right corner of your photo. Pretty much self explanatory. Don't you think? The most obscure aspect in all of this is the Bula part.

Watermark expressions are extremely sensitive to extra spacing and casing. Tip: Do not add extra spaces between the placement and the equal sign, or in between your watermark content quoted string and the equal sign.

For the bottom-right corner of your photo, you can either use bottomRightWatermark, or simply watermark, for short. That is, bottomRightWatermark="Bula World" and watermark="Bula World" are equivalent.

You can add more than one watermark to your photos. For example, you can add one in the top-left corner, and another one in the bottom-right corner. We will look at this later but before that, lets progressively disclose how to control the contents of your watermark.

Note that you can add one or more formatting parameters. All you need to do is to separate them with an ampersand sign (&). The complete list of text formatting parameters can be found in the Watermark Hep Topic. Here are the most common:

Colors: In terms of colors, I like to set a bright color for the text (color), a dark one for the outline and then white for the halo. That ensures the watermark will stand out on top of your photo. The W3Schools list of color codes and hexadecimal values is a great place to help you define colors properly.

Text (and image) Size: The size parameter deserves a more detailed explanation. Setting the right size is going to be a trial and error exercise and will largely depend on how you plan to use your watermarks. For example, you may want to watermark photos so you can use them in a printed report, or simply show them in a screen within a dashboard or web mapping application. Depending on the use, you may want larger or smaller text. Testing the size of your text in Survey123 Connect can be tempting, but you really want to look at your watermarks in the same environment where your users will ultimately use them. Do not go by what you see in Connect: validate your text size on paper if you intend to print, on a mobile device if you want people to preview the watermark from a device, etc

The size parameter is measured in pixels. For this reason, the size of the photo really comes into play. While there are many devices out there and each may generate photos of different sizes, Survey123 allows you to define the size of photos taken with the Survey123 camera. This is controlled through the Optinons Images section in Connect as shown below.

By default, Survey123 Connect always sets your image size to 640px on the longest edge. In a 640px image, text at 12 pixels in size will show pixelated. You could increase the size to 16 pixels for better results. If you change the image size to 1280, at 12px your text will be very small; you may want to change then the size to 24 or 26.

Very often you will want to add information in your watermark about the current date, time and location where the photo was taken. You may be tempted to use XLSForm variables to get this information into your watermark, but you should not. We will learn later how to add data from your form into the watermark.

It is possible to add a watermark using data previously entered in your form. In the example at the very beginning of this article, we added the Job ID value to the watermark. You could also add an address or a priority, even some comments from the person completing the form.

Data from your form cannot be added directly in the bind::esri:parameters column. Do not attempt to include standard XLSForm functions within your watermark expression. The right way to do this is to first put together the watermark content in a separate question, and then reference that. Here is a basic example:

Note how the first half of the watermark expression defining the placement of the watermark is added in the bind::esri:parameters while the second half, defining the content, is prepared in a separate calculate question and then referenced through an XLSForm variable.

To compose the watermark content, I am using a calculate type of question. Calculate questions are never shown in the actual form, but are useful when you want to compute some temporary values to be used somewhere else within the form. The value is computed using an expression in the calculation column. A calculate question is very similar to a hidden question. The only difference is that calculations are compulsory for calculate questions and not for hidden questions.

The safest way to construct complex watermark expressions is through the concat() function. You can do pretty interesting things when working in this way. Not only you can bring data from your form, but also control the formatting of your text dynamically. In the next example, we set the color and content of the watermark text dynamically based on information entered by the user in the form.

Finally, note that when you reference watermark content in bind::esri:parameters as shown above, you no longer need to enclose the second half of the watermark expression with double quotes. Double quotes are needed to help the parser process the contents of bind::esri:parameters in case that you include spaces in your watermark expression. When you reference pre-computed watermark content like in this example, you can't add spaces, so no quotes are needed.

Now that you know how to create your own watermark expressions, you may like to hear that you can add many to the same photo! All you need to do is to separate your different watermark expressions with spaces within the bind::esri: parameters column.

As with many things XLSForms, you will want to start easy and increase the complexity of your watermark expressions progressively. You can use Survey123 Connect to make sure your syntax is good and do some preliminary testing, but eventually you will want to test your watermarks from the field app and if you plan your photos to be printed, print them to make sure you get them right.

I'm a beginner with photoshop.

I'm taking photos for a dance association and I would like to add the logo of the association in the corner of the photos for all the photos (around 50/week). I found a way of doing it (may be not the best, but it works) : I wrote a small serie of actions (import the logo / align down / align left / flatten image / save / close). Then I use Batch processing to apply this serie of action on my photos.

The problem is that I crop most of my photos so they don't have the same final size. But I could not find a way to adjust the size of the logo to match th size of the photo : sometimes, it is too small and sometimes too big compared to the size of the photo.

Do you have any idea how I could solve my problem (without manually setting up the size of the logo each time).

I created a 5000*5000 transparent image in which I placed the logo with the right proportion and at the right place.

Hence, when I import this new image on a picture, it automatically adapt its size to fit the picture and the logo have the right size.

Some photographers believe adding a watermark is good for marketing. If every image in your portfolio bears your watermark, it can help to build your brand and your profile - particularly if an image of yours gains popularity or goes viral.

Most photos are owned by the person who took the shot. However, without a watermark, it can be harder to identify the owner. A watermark can put anyone interested in using the image in your direction if it contains your name or your brand.

This is a key reason some photographers avoid watermarking. Photography is all about lighting, composition and subject. Adding a watermark can detract from the art. Even the most subtle watermark might diminish the power of a photo.

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