Friday, November 13, 2009

Watermarking photos using GIMP

Some of my friends were interested in knowing how I add my name at the lower right side of the images I post here. The short answer is that I use a GIMP script to get this done. The long answer follows:

Few years back one fine day I decided to put my name in some photos and started editing the photos with GIMP. However, manually adding a text in the images turned out to be difficult and the text position were inconsistent across images. So in lines with Unix philosophy of "if you have to do something twice, write a script", I ventured into writing this script. I read few Script-Fu tutorials and managed to write this script. Please excuse the usage of my name all over the script.

Follow these steps to this script.
  1. Download GIMP from http://www.gimp.org and install it.
  2. Download the script Prime.scm
  3. Save the script in the script folder of gimp installation. In GIMP select Edit->Preferences. In the preferences window expand the "Folders" in the left pane and select Scripts. You will be able find the scripts directories listed in the right pane. Make sure that the file is saved with the extension .scm.
  4. Restart GIMP.
  5. Open an image using GIMP and the menu Prime will be visible. Select the menu item Prime and the text will be added at the bottom right hand.
Some changes will be required to get your name in there. Follow these steps to get it done.

In the script, change the words 'Your text goes here' to the text you want to put in the image.
Adjust the numeric values in the following lines so that your text is at the right position:
(x (- width 175)) ; Set the x coordinate.
(y (- height 40)) ; Set the y coordinate.

To change the color of the text, change the RGB values in the following line :
(gimp-context-set-foreground '(120 120 120)) ; Set the text colour

Restart GIMP once these changes are done.

It is a pain to open individual files, select the menu and save it. So I wrote another script that will make changes in all the files in a given folder. Things worked fine till the Script-Fu syntax changed in a newer version of GIMP and the scripts stopped working. I managed to rewrite the above script for the new version of GIMP one day but didn't get a chance to fix the other script. If I get enough time and patience, I will fix it one day and post it here.

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) License

Creative Commons License
The images and photographs posted in this blog by Prime Jyothi are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) License.