Disruptive Conversations

Over at Saunderslog, I have been curious about how Alec Saunders was getting a watermark of his URL across the bottom of his blog images, as shown on the right in the quick screenshot I took of the twitter window. I thought he might be using some new feature in Flickr or in some other editing program. In any event, it turns out to be a feature of Microsoft's Windows Live Writer beta which he is using.  The funny thing is that I'm using WLW as well, but had not yet discovered this interesting little feature. (Nor is it clearly mentioned on the WLW information page.)

Using this watermarking capability is remarkably simple. First you insert your image into WLW, which might just be a simple "Paste" from another program.  As shown in the screenshot on the left, when you click on the image to select it, you get a sidebar for the "Image Properties".  I use the first and second tabs all the time, but had never played with the third "Effects" tab.

Ta da... click on the green "+" sign to get a drop-down menu, choose "Overlays" and then "Watermark".  Enter the URL and change the font and sizing and you're done!

What's nice is that WLW is changing the image itself versus using CSS or something like that... which is what I would want it to do, so it's great to see. 

Since I was exploring this third tab, I also now noticed that under the "+" sign there is a "Transformations" menu with a number of image effects, such as "Black&White", "Sepia", "Sharpen", "Blur", etc.  Now I typically do such manipulation in some other program (like Google's Picasa), but it's nice to know these are here if I just want a quick change to an image.

So thanks, Alec, for pointing me to something I already had and just hadn't fully explored.

As to Windows Live Writer, what I don't get is why the WLW blog hasn't been updated since November.  Has Microsoft stopped development on it? Or paused their work?   There does seem to be activity in their forum... it's just curious that there have been no blog posts in, now, almost four months.  Puzzling...