Protect an image without opening a photo editor

Watermarking in Total CMS is part of ImageWorks, so it happens on the server as an image is rendered rather than in a photo editor before upload. The original file stays clean on disk, the marked version is what gets served, and it is cached like any other transformation.

There are two kinds of mark and they can be used together. An image watermark overlays another file: mark names it, markw and markh size it in pixels or as a percentage such as 15w, markpos places it in one of nine positions, and markpad and markalpha handle the inset and the opacity. A text watermark renders type directly onto the image with marktext, controlled by size, colour, an optional background colour, padding, rotation angle, width and transparency. By default the text spans 40% of the image width, so it carries the same weight on a thumbnail as on the original; marktextw sets another width and marktextsize a fixed size. marktextstroke and marktextshadow add an outline and a drop shadow, sized as a share of the font so they hold at any image size, and keep the text readable on light and dark photos alike. Fonts are TTF or OTF files uploaded to the watermark-fonts depot; the default is Roboto Regular.

A single mark in a corner can be cropped out. Set marktextpos to tile and the text repeats over the whole image in offset rows, at 30° and 30% opacity unless you choose otherwise, with marktextrepeat setting how many marks run across. That is the proofing mark: a client can judge the photo, and no corner is left clean to crop.

Passing those parameters per call is fine for a one-off. Setting them on the schema is what turns a watermark into protection rather than decoration. Put a watermark block in the property's settings and two things change. First, the mark applies even when the URL asks for nothing — a parameter-free image URL normally returns the untouched original, and that shortcut is skipped, so there is no URL that yields a clean file. Second, schema settings are merged after anything in the query string, so a visitor cannot weaken, move or remove the mark by editing the URL.

Marking every derivative is rarely what you want, because a watermark stamped across a 150-pixel thumbnail is just ugly. The limit setting is a pixel threshold: renders below it come back clean, renders above it are marked, and a request with no dimensions at all — the one asking for the original — counts as over the limit rather than under it. Pixel density counts too, so w=600&dpr=3 is an 1800-pixel image and is marked as one.

Watermark settings follow the same three-level override hierarchy as the rest of the image configuration: schema, then collection, then per-object. A stock photography collection can carry a heavier mark than the rest of the site, and one particular image can be handled differently, without a template change anywhere. Replace the logo file under the same name and every image picks up the new mark on its next request.