How to Brand Your WordPress Images with Pixelmator’s Watermark Automator Action

Branding is an important aspect of a successful blog. Watermarking your images and videos can help in creating that brand. I use watermarking not so much to protect my images from content theft as to facilitate branding.

How you Can Automatically Resize and Watermark your Images with Pixelmator

Resizing and watermarking your images manually is a chore. In this post you will learn how you can automate this with these two applications:

• Automator is an application which gets shipped with OS X. You can use it to automate tasks you need to do over and over again like resizing images for your blog.

• Pixelmator is an excellent image editor for the Mac. Pixelmator adds some actions to Automator; for example, the Automator actions Watermark Images and Fit Images.

The goal is to have one folder we can drop our images into and then trigger the watermarking and resizing automatically. The watermarked images should be moved to a separate folder. So we will preserve the original images or screenshots and have the modified ones in another folder.

Creating the Automator Folder Action

1. Create a folder where you want to store your original images and screenshots. I named this folder CuteMachineImages.
2. Create a folder where you want to store the images created by automator. I named this folder WordPressReady.
3. Open Automator. From the file menu select new and choose the workflow template Folder Action.
4. I use png[1] files on CuteMachine. Therefore, I add the action Change Type of Images to convert the tiff or any other image type to the png image type. You can add actions to your workflow by dragging an action from the library pane on the left and dropping it into the workflow pane on the right.
5. Add the Fit Images action. With this action you can constrain your images to a certain size.
6. Add the Watermark Images Automator action. For this action you need to drag and drop your watermark image to the placeholder as seen in the screenshot. Make sure to choose an image which will be seen on all backgrounds, for example, a black string with a white background.
7. Add the Move Finder Items Automator action to move the newly created file to the folder you created in step 2.

In the following screenshot you can see the Automator actions for the above workflow. You can also see the CuteMachine.com watermark at the center bottom:

Editing an Automator Folder Action

If you need to edit a folder action here is how to do it:

1. Go to the folder with the attached folder action in Finder.
2. Right click the folder and select Services > Folder Actions Setup... from the context menu. This will open the Folder Actions Setup application.
3. We do not want to attach a new folder action, but want to edit a folder action we previously attached to the folder. Therefore, press the cancel button.
4. Select the folder action in the right pane of the Folder Action Setup application and click the Edit Script button. This will open the Automator with the workflow.
5. Make your changes and save.

Add this Automator workflow to your images folder and all of your images will be watermarked with your brand image. If you want, you could even add an Automator action to upload the images to your WordPress installation automatically. This will save you even more time for maintaining your blog. If you are interested in how to do this, let me know and I will walk you through.

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Tagged as: automation, automator, blogging, image, pixelmator, resizing, watermark, watermarking, wordpress, workflow