Ever wanted a quick-and-easy way to slap a watermark on a digital photo, so that no pesky bloggers can claim it as their own without permission? Ever wanted to slap a watermark on dozens of photos at a time? Image Agent might help.
It’s a simple utility, one of those does-one-job-very-well apps. You’ll notice right from the start how clean and smart it looks. It has an Aperture-esque white-on-black color scheme, set off with some very small but very nice details.
If Jony Ive needs some inspiration for Apple app design now that he’s in charge of that stuff at Cupertino, he should have a screenshot of Image Agent stuck on his Pinterest board. Go ahead Jony, grab that screenshot above. Take it. You’re welcome.
The workflow is simple: import an image, or a selection of images. They’ll appear as thumbnails, but you’ll spend most of your time fiddling with options in the panel to the left.
Importing is done by drag-and-drop, either from the Finder or from a photo library (such as Aperture). Make sure you don’t get caught by the same Aperture bug that I did: if dragging images out of it doesn’t work, right-click on the images you’re after and choose “Update previews” from the menu. That’ll fix it.
Once you’ve got some images ready, you can start messing with them. The options you select will be applied to all the images in the batch. You can change image names (including adding a text suffix to existing names), resize, add a logo, and a variety of text and line watermark effects. As you fiddle, you might spot one of the nice details I referred to earlier – a glowing green dot appears next to drop-down menus where you’ve made changes, so you can instantly see if you’ve forgotten anything. The green dot itself is tiny, but beautifully presented. Details like this can make such a difference.
One drawback is that Image Agent offers no preset-saving function, so you’ll have to re-enter your chosen effects and edits every time you open the app for a new batch. Another is that the resizing options are limited – you only get to choose one of either max width or max height, and you can’t specify that resizing is done by longest side. As a result, in a batch of mixed portrait and landscape images, you’ll get some that end up bigger than others.
Ten dollars isn’t much to ask for an app this well designed, but the drawbacks are quite significant ones, particularly if you’re using this app in a professional capacity. I look forward to seeing updates that fix these issues and give the app a little bit more functional oomph.
Source: Mac App Store
