artefactual
Enhancement: watermark feature
Currently, the watermark feature tiles the image across the page, appearing multiple times. Could we have a customisable watermark feature e.g., positioning, opacity, placing a single image or text rather than tiled?
We have also received a similar feature request, here:
Given this could I suggest that future releases of AtoM use the ImageMagick PHP API and offer the admin user a more flexible set of interface features to effect how watermarks and copyright are configured: text strings, fonts, colour, orientation (rotate) etc.
Might as well mention that there is a community-created plugin to add per-institution watermarks that can be managed via the repository page, listed here:
- https://wiki.accesstomemory.org/Community/Community_resources/Development#Per-institution_watermarks_for_digital_objects
Though originally developed a decade ago, their creator (Jason Hildebraand of PeaceWorks Solutions) has kept them mostly up-to-date - i think they are currently compatible with 2.8 or 2.9, not sure. Would likely need BS5 changes.
Anyway, just mentioning them bc I always thought it was a useful feature
To follow up on previous request by ravengermain using the ImagieMagick PHP API instead of exec () calls is a good idea in any case. The current watermarking facility is pretty basic and the results are not good from a UI perspective..
I use a Bash script on Linux or macOS which calls magick to:
- batch convert archival TIFFs to JPEGs,
- set the quality,
- resize them in height retaining the aspect ratio,
- add an opaque text watermark centred across the image rotated at 45 degrees,
- place a copyright statement in the south-east corner.
The text, fonts, colour, opacity and orientation can all be adjusted to suit. Let me know if you would like a copy.
The requested watermark features could be provided in an HTML form with drop down selectors etc. I'm not a PHP developer but it is possible to produce a working demo prototype using the PHP -API for comment using an LLM such as Qwen's Qwen3-Coder LLM - which is free :-)
