PhotoBulk Lite App REVIEW Protect your Images with a Watermark

Free Watermark App may be one of the easiest to use Apps on the App Store.  Everyone should download this app.

Some of the issues that novice and professional photographers must overcome include protecting your intellectual properties and data rights, data storage and image editing.  We do not want to put in a bunch of effort taking pictures and then lose the rights to them, as someone uses them without our permission.  Watermarking is an option that allows us to protect our work.  If you only take a few pictures, it is rather easy to use any number of photo editing software tools to modify the image.  However, what if you take dozens, hundreds or perhaps even more?  What if you want to add the same logo to every one of the images?  What if you want to put up pictures on Facebook, what if you are a seller and want others to stop using your hard-effort created display masterpieces?  If it is watermarked, it could lead back to your site, and someone may notice that it was your picture.  The newly updated PhotoBulk App may be just the ticket.

The iOS PhotoBulk App, available in paid ($9.99) and lite (free) versions, is an application that was designed to add watermarks to numerous pictures at once.  Instead of editing each picture individually, the application allows you to choose the font, the style, the opacity, the color, and the location of your image.  The description on the Lite App page promised that this app would be incredibly easy to understand and utilize.  Essentially, all it says that we have to do is to drag a batch of images from one window to another and hit the start button to save the watermark to all of them.   As of my review, there were no comments about the Lite app on the iOS app store.  The PhotoBulk: watermark in batch ($9.99) application promised more photo editing tools than the lite version.  The app originated two years ago and had only recently been updated by Eltima LLC.   Just like in the free edition, the paid edition will allow you to create a text watermark, adjust it to your liking and add it to any number of images.  However, the paid version will also allow more than just text watermarks.  For just under $10 you can add and customize image watermarks, script watermarks, date stamps, and bulk resize hundreds of photos at once.  The description promises the ability to change all of the batch images to a specific height/width, change them to a certain percentage, to max size and customize a size. The paid app also promised the ability to rename all of the pictures in sequence instead of random weird camera names.  You can choose how the filenames will change/adjust.  You can convert all of the desired images into a different format (JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, HEIC), save those settings that you use regularly and see the images in real time before saving them.   There are currently 118 ratings on the iOS App store with a total of eighty-one 5*, nineteen 4*, three 3*, five 2* and ten 1*.  Unfortunately, only 2 of these are for Photobulk 2.0 and the remainder are from 2016 and 2017, when the App was not yet updated.

After I downloaded the PhotoBulk Lite App, I clicked “Open” and was greeted by a black opening app screen.  Towards my left, I found “Watermark, Postprocessing resize/optimize and Export format/metadata/rename” in white font.  As I will detail below, most of these features did not work in the Lite App and requested that you buy the $10 paid version.  Along the top of the app screen, there was a white “Bulk Settings”, a blue “Default”, and towards my bottom left a “+” icon and instructions that state to “Use [+] or drop images here.  Lastly, there was a greyed out start button on my bottom right.  When I selected watermark, the app opened another screen showing an educational panel.  You will have an editable “Text” box, and then you can rotate this, scale this, move this by moving the selection handles around the text.  After you click through the educational panel, you can double-click “Text” and then type whatever you want into the watermark section.  For testing, I used a few pictures of the latest Catalyst AirPods Coral Color and added “Creating a Watermark.”  As an aside, if you unclick the checkmark next to Watermark, or if you touch the trashcan icon, you will lose the watermark that you had been working on.   If you click the lock icon, it will change from an unlocked state to a locked state, but I could not discover what this did in the lite app.  Even with the lock icon in the locked position, messing with the checkbox or the trashcan icon still eliminated the data. If you click on Resize, Optimize, Format, Metadata, Rename or click the drop-down next to Text (Text, Image, Datestamp, Script), it will bring up a warning stating that Photobulk lite does not have those features and you should buy the full app.

To continue testing the Lite App, I opened photos and tried to drag a group of four Coral colored Catalyst Airpod images into the App.  I was able to select them and could drag them to the desktop, but I could not drag the images from Photos to the application.  I was able to drag the images from the desktop into the app and from Finder folders into the application. The App may seem overly simple at first, but that is honestly the magic of the PhotoBulk app.  Each of the images will acquire the same watermark in the same angle and the same color/quality.  If the watermark seems odd in one of your images and you adjust it, it adjusts for all of them.   I am very interested in seeing what the Paid app can do, especially after playing with the free app.  The app was able to wet-my-whistle for photo marking, and I would like to consider image marking in the future.

Learn more About PhotoBulk and Eltima Software
Follow Eltima on Facebook and Twitter.