# Exif wMarker

Batch Image Watermarker

for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7

#### Content

## Introduction

Exif wMarker is a simple and user friendly software that allows you to put text over your images. Exif wMarker allows you to batch process all images inside a folder and automatically write over them any information taken from exif or iptc metadata field.

File types supported are Jpeg and Tiff. Iptc tags are read from Jpeg files only. Most of the Exif tags will be copied to the watermarked images but all iptc tags will be removed.

wMarker has a context sensitive help, just click on the small question mark in the title bar, then move the cursor and click on the item you wish to know more, a tooltip with additional info will appear.

## How to use Exif wMarker

1First of all you must set the source and destination folders. Source folder is where you original pictures are stored. wMarker will process all images in the source folder and all subfolders. The folders tree will be replicated in the destination folder.

2Second step, set the text you wish to write on your images. You can have both a header and a footer, but you are free to move these two areas where you wish. You can simply enter some text in the text boxes, or you can include the content of Exif/Iptc tags in your pictures. The enter Exif/ Iptc tags click on the buttons labeled "Exif" or "Iptc" a menu with a list of tags will open, choose the tag you wish to insert. The button "File Info" allows you to enter info about the file itself like the file name or file date.

3Now you can choose how the text will be displayed on the images. Click on the button "Text..", the window "Text Settings" will open and here you can play with options and settings until you find something you like.

4Optionally you can set a logo or any other small image to be overlaid on your pictures. Enter the file name with full path in the box labeled "Logo or Image File" then click on the "Settings" button to set its position and transparency. If the file is in png format Exif wMarker will use the transparency information embedded in the file itself (alpha channel).

5If you also wish to resize you images just enable the checkbox "Resize Images" and click on the button "Resize Settings.." to set the resize option.

6Set the Jpeg quality setting. 0 Means Best Compression but Worst quality. 100 Means Best quality. You can experiment with values between 90 and 96, they give a good quality. Try with lower values if you wish a better compression.

7Optionally choose the formats used for time and date fields. You can choose whether to display time with hour and minutes or with hours, minutes and seconds. For date you can choose between a short format and an extended format with week day name.

8When you are ready with the settings just click on "Start" and wait.

wMarker will always remember the last settings you used but you can also save your current settings and recall settings you saved before by using the "Load" and "Save" buttons.

Custom Date Format

wMarker can use two standard date formats using the windows settings, in addition it is possible to set a custom format by using the syntax explained here.

If there spaces to separate the elements in the format string, these spaces will appear in the same location in the output string. The letters must be in uppercase or lowercase as shown in the table, for example, "MM" not "mm". Characters in the format string that are enclosed in single quotation marks appear in the same location and unchanged in the output string.

Chars | Meaning
--- | ---
d | Day of month as digits with no leading zero for single-digit days.
dd | Day of month as digits with leading zero for single-digit days.
ddd | Day of week as a three-letter abbreviation.
dddd | Day of week as its full name.
M | Month as digits with no leading zero for single-digit months.
MM | Month as digits with leading zero for single-digit months.
MMM | Month as a three-letter abbreviation.
MMMM | Month as its full name.
y | Year as last two digits, but with no leading zero for years less than 10.
yy | Year as last two digits, but with leading zero for years less than 10.
yyyy | Year represented by full four or five digits, depending on the calendar used. Thai Buddhist and Korean calendars both have five digit years. The "yyyy" pattern will show five digits for these two calendars, and four digits for all other supported calendars.
yyyyy | Identical to "yyyy".
gg | Period/era string.

For example, to get the date string

Wed, Aug 31 08

you must use the following picture string:

ddd',' MMM dd yy

## Resize Settings

####

In this window you can decide how you pictures will be resized. Resize is always performed with a high quality bicubic interpolation, a prefilter is also applied to keep a good level of sharpness when reducing images.

In the "Operation" field you can the type of resize to perform.

Resize exactly to the requested size: Images will always have the exact size you set in this window. If aspect ratio of images is different from the requested size images can be cropped, stretched or the empty space ca be simply filled with a color. This option is ideal when you wish to prepare your images for a digital photo frame and you don't like the way the photo frame software resizes your images. When this resize method is selected it is possible to resize pictures to a percentage of original images. To do this select "Percent" instead of "Pixels" from the control on the right. When "Percent" is selected the values in width and height are the percentage of original size. For example to scale pictures to half size enter 50 in both width and height.

Fit within Height Only: Image height will have a given size while width will be calculated

Fit within Width Only: Image width will have a given size while height will be calculated

Fit within Width And Height: Both width and height will always be less or equal than values set in this window.

Reduce big images
If selected wMarker reduces big images to fit to requested size

Enlarge small images
If selected wMarker enlarges small images to fit to requested size.

Enlarge small images by no more than:
If enabled wMarker won't enlarge images more than the value selected from the control on the right. It always advisable to limit enlargement of small images because if they are enlarged too much they looks grainy or fuzzy.

Enlarge only images bigger than:
You can prevent wMarker from enlarging very small images by enabling this option and entering the minimum size of the pictures that you wish to be enlarged in the edit boxes on the right.

If Image Aspect Ratio doesn't match with Target Aspect Ratio
In this section you set the behavior of wMarker when the aspect ratio of an image doesn't match with the aspect ratio of the size you requested. This happens when you resize a 3000x2000 picture to 1024x768 (picture 3:2, requested 4:3 )

Fill empty space with background color
This is the default, the original aspect ratio of the image is kept and the empty space is filled with the background color. If Auto is checked the color will be choosen automatically based on image tone.

Stretch and Crop image to fit
If selected wMarker will fill the requested size even if the picture needs to be distorted (or cropped). If original aspect ratio and requested aspect ratio differ too much image will retain its original aspect ratio. The Limit field will be used by wMarker to determine whether the image can be distorted (cropped) or it must retain its original aspect ratio. wMarker calculates the difference between the requested aspect ratio and the aspect ratio of the image, if it is less than the limit the image can be distorted. So the formula is: if abs((req width/req height)-(img width/img height))<(Limit/100) then image can be distorted.
A typical case is when you have a 16:9 display and your photos have a 3.2 or 4:3 aspect ratio, here are some typical values for the Limit field:
18 : Allows to stretch/crop images with 16:10 aspect ratio
28 : Allows to stretch/crop images with 16:10 or 3:2 aspect ratio
45 : Allows to stretch/crop images with 16:10, 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio

The slider below this field allows you to control the percentage of stretch and crop, less stretch (and distortion) causes a higher crop. If the slider is on the left images will only be stretched (and distorted), if the slider is on the right they will only be cropped. By moving the slider you can choose the percentage of the two operations.

Apply Unsharp Mask (Sharpen Images)
Resize operations always cause a loss of sharpness, to restore original sharpness (or even increase it a little) it is possible to apply a so called "unsharp mask", a filter that improves image sharpness. Default value is 0.5 as radius and 100 as amount, these settings are suitable for small images that should be seen on screen without resize and that already have a good sharpness. Bigger images could need a higher radius and images that are less sharp could need a higher amount. The value of radius depends on the size of details in original image, pictures with fine details like a landscape are better sharpened with a small radius. You can experiment with radius values from 0.4 to 1.0 and with values for amount from 75 to 200. In general to increase sharpness it is better to keep radius low and increase amount.
The Threshold value limits sharpening in areas with uniform color, you should increase it when pictures are noisy.

Perform Gamma Corrected resize
The human eye is more sensitive to differences between the dark colors, than to differences between the light ones. This nonlinearity is used in the sRGB encoding, so that the amount of light emitted by display phosphors depends on RGB values not linearly, but through a power function. Usually, is is not needed to know this and account for it; but in graphics processing, when several pixels are mixed together, naively mixing their RGB codes leads to parts of the resulting image becoming darker than they should be, and smaller bright details being lost. To counter this problem pictures are converted to linear gamma, resized and sharpened then converted back to original sRGB gamma.

In other words when this option is enabled resized pictures look more natural, they keep original colors with less artifacts.

Gamma correction is made optional, instead of being used always by default, because user might want to disable it to better preserve small dark details on a bright background which otherwise would be lost in the glare. Also, because most other software, such as GIMP, doesn't have gamma correction, and user might want results identical to those produced by such software.

## Text Settings

In the Text Settings dialog you can edit the settings used by wMarker to write text over images.

Outline
If enabled the text will have a border (outline). Glow and Emboss presets outline values to obtain these effects. When you use Emboss effect it is also a good idea to set text opacity to 0, in this way the inside of the text will be transparent.

Size
Set here outline size (pixels)

Opacity
Set here outline opacity (0=transparent)

Shadow
If enabled text will have a shadow

X
Set here the relative position of the shadow (horizontal)

Y
Set here the relative position of the shadow (vertical)

Opacity
Set here shadow opacity (0=transparent)

Text
Configure text font, size and color

Align
Set here desired text alignment

Antialias
If enabled wMarker will use antialias to soften text borders. It's useful mostly with big text sizes. With some combinations of outline and text opacity settings Antialias may be disabled.

Background
Set here text background color

Opacity
Set here text background opacity (0=transparent)

Text Position
The controls in this box allows you to set the position of the text.

Horizontal
Set here horizontal text position

Vertical
Set here vertical text position

Margin
Set here the margin from image border

Preview
Click here to show a preview of the current settings

## Logo or Image File Settings

In the Logo or Image File Settings dialog you can edit the settings used by wMarker to overlay a small logo on your images. Here you can set logo opacity and position. For best results use a file smaller than your images and save it in png format, in this way Exif wMarker will use the transparency information embedded in the file itself (alpha channel).

Opacity
Set here overlaid image opacity (0=transparent)

Position
The controls in this box allows you to set the position of the logo

Horizontal
Set here horizontal logo position

Vertical
Set here vertical logo position

Margin
Set here the margin from image border

## Advanced Options

The Microsoft library used by Exif wMarker is not able to copy all Exif, IPTC, XMP tags embedded inside photos, it can only manage most common Exif tags, to copy everything from original files to the files created by Exif wMarker the program needs ExifTool, a free program created by Phil Harvey. It can be downloaded from the author's web site.

The Advanced Options windows allows you to choose what do to with the tags embedded in your original files. The default option is to copy only common exif fields, everything else will be deleted. As an alternative it is possible to remove everything or to copy everything.

To copy all tags you need to install ExifTool then configure here where it can found on your computer. The default options instructs ExifTool to copy everything and unless you have specific requirements you don't need to edit those options.

If you are familiar with ExifTool command you can specify your own parameters. The options in the field "Common Options" are added only once in the ExifTool command line while the options in the field "Options and arguments for each file" are written to a file once for each image then the files is provided to ExifTool using the -@ option.

Note: the Orientation field must not be copied since wMarker already rotates images according to the Orientation flag.

## Custom Captions from csv files

Exif wMarker supports a broad range of exif and iptc tags however there are cases where you simply want to add a caption or a description over your images without editing each image and modifying its tags. In this case you can use a simple csv (comma separated values) to provide wMarker with captions for your images.

A CSV file is a simple text file with values separated by commas, for example there are 2 samples of valid csv lines:

IMG0001.JPG,my caption,my description

"IMG002.JPG","my second caption","my second description"

The first field must be the file name without path. Then following fields are captions, descriptions and any other text you wish to overlay over your images. It is better to surround each field with double quotation marks.

The file must be named ExifwMarker.csv and placed in the same folder of the images.

Then to get values from the csv file you must use the tags:

[Csv.0] for the file name without path

[Csv.1] for the first field

[Csv.2] for the second field

and so on.

CSV files can be prepared with notepad or with a spreadsheet program, for example OpenOffice Calc

## Command Line

Exif wMarker accepts some command line parameters:

/B settings.wmrk: Loads the file specified after the parameter and starts automatically

/L settings.wmrk: Loads the file specified after the parameter

The filename specified must be complete with full path and if it contains spaces must be surrounded by double quotes, for example:

"c:\program files\Exif wMarker\wMarker.exe" /B "c:\my picturers\settings.wmrk"