WP Image Protect Premium Documentation

Preamble

This guide outlines the sucessful installation and configuration of WP Image Protect Premium. You are safe in the knowledge that you are using one of the best content protection plugins, your support goes towards the continued development of the plugin. This guide has been updated for version 1.8 of the plugin, some features may not appear in earlier versions.

Installation

Requirements

WP Image Protect Premium requires the following be installed on your server:

• A self-hosted WordPress installation version 3.4 or higher (tested up to 3.5.1). WordPress.com installations are not compatible with this plugin.
• GD Library version 2.0 or higher with FreeType, PNG and JPG support enabled.

If you are unsure if your installation is compatible, you may wish to consider using the WP Image Protect Lite plugin, which will test your installation and report compatibility.

Steps

1. Login to your WordPress administration panel, this is usually the url of your site followed by /wp-admin.
2. Ensure to deactivate and delete any previous instance of WP Image Protect, though your settings will be preserved, your site will not be protected and no watermarks will be displayed until you activate the new plugin. You may wish to consider installing and activating the Maintenance Mode plugin before you do this to make your site temporarily unavailable to non-administrators while the plugin is updated.
3. From the administration homescreen click on Plugins->Add New link on the left side of the page.
4. From the Install Plugins page select Upload.
5. Click Choose File and navigate to where the wp-image-protect-premium-xxx.zip file you downloaded is located (note this is completely self-contained and does not require un-zipping prior to uploading to your site). Click Install Now, then on the next page, when the upload is complete, click Activate Now.
6. Initially, no watermarking will be applied to images on your site, as the plugin options need configuring. To do this select Settings->WP Image Protect Settings on the left  side of the administration page.

Configuration

From the WP Image Protect Premium Settings page there are three sections – Visible Watermark Settings,  Preview and Advanced WPIPP Options (which is usually hidden by default). The  Preview section allows you to preview how watermarks currently appear on your site once you save any modifications to the settings.

The Visible Watermarking Settings section has a drop down selection called enabled allowing one of three choices for Watermarking on your site – None, Text or Image. None means that no Watermarks appear on images on your site, Text allows you to place a line of text across images on your site and Image allows you to place another image watermark on top of images on your site.If the Text or Image option is selected, several further options then appear.

The Watermark Only Size option allows you to specify the minimum image size of an image before a Watermark is applied. If the original image is either wider or taller than the specified Size option, then the Watermark is applied, otherwise no watermark is applied. This is useful when you have thumbnails or other small images that would not benefit from watermarking. (Note: If a Size option of 400px or greater is specified, the preview will no longer display the watermark and you will need to preview watermarks on a larger image from your site.)

Watermark Position specifies how the watermark will be displayed on images, there are 10 options: one for each corner, a centre option and a tile option. The tile option will repeat the watermark across and down the image.

Watermark Scaling will scale any watermarks relative to similar proportions as the preview. Though the image and watermark are re-sampled, the watermark may appear pixelated on large images.

Watermark Transparency allows you to control the transparency of  the watermark on the image, this can be a value of 0-100, where 0 is no transparency, so the watermark is opaque on the image and 100 where the watermark is completely transparent and is not visible over the original image (Note: if a PNG image watermark that has alpha transparency or a text watermark with transparent background is used, these sections will appear black on the image if a transparency greater than 0 is specified) .

If Text watermarking is enabled, there are several further options available. The Watermark Text option is the text that is displayed on the watermark, you can specify variable text watermarks here (see section below). This defaults to the site title, but allows you can specify any text you wish. The text font, size and colour can be specified in the next three sections.  The text background colour can be set in the Background Colour dropdown, and can also be transparent (i.e no background will be applied). The Text Margin specifies the additional background margin width to be applied around the text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If Image watermarking is enabled, a watermark image can be specified, either an existing image from the WordPress image library, or you can upload your own image. Selecting Upload Watermark Image will open the WordPress gallery manager, you can select an image from your Computer, from URL or from the Media Library, using the tabs at the top. Select the Use this as watermark button to use use this image as the watermark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At any time, selecting the Save Changes button will save the options and allow you to preview the changes on the image preview.

The Advanced options section contains options for the advanced functionality of WP Image Protect Premium.  Hotlinking Prevention can be enabled or disabled here. Note that as of version 1.7.4+, performance has been improved such that caching by the plugin is no longer required and the option removed. To improve performance further, you may wish to consider the use of a caching plugin such as WP Super Cache.

This sections also defines an option for render images – the default is JPG which is the quickest to display images, for sites that contain lots of transparent images that you need to watermark you may wish to consider using PNG.

The rewrite rules section defines the rewrite rules which are used to make the plugin work. It is recommended you do not alter these unless you are aware of how these work and you wish to alter what content the plugin processes (for example to make the plugin compatible with non-standard image galleries). Rules are defined by a source and target regular expressions, mapped using the => arrow. Multiple rewrite rules can be specified, separated with a comma. To activate the rules, they need to be saved and the WP rewrite engine flushed, which can be done by clicking Settings->Permalinks.

Some images, such as logos and large site images you may wish not to watermark, even if they are larger than the Watermark Only size. WP Image Protect provides an easy mechanism to exclude individual images from the watermarking function. From the WordPress administration menu select Media->Library. In the media library list, the column Excluded from Watermarking indicates whether the media item is excluded from watermarking. By default this is no for all images, but you can change this option by hovering over the image a selecting Edit on the menu that appears, checking the WPIPP Exclude from Watermarking option and clicking update media will result in no watermark being applied to the image.

Variable Text Watermarks

WP Image Protect Premium offers users a number of variable watermark text items that can be used in text watermarks. This allows you to add things such as the name of the user that uploaded the image, the date the image was uploaded and the title of the image. This is a new feature and any feedback or comments are appreciated,  please use the contact link.

The variable text items that can be used are listed below, to use simply include in the Watermark Text settings. For example, a watermark text of by {author_full_name} would appear as by Joe Bloggs when an image uploaded by Joe Bloggs is displayed. The preview shows the position of the text but not the actual text as this can change. You can use more that one piece of variable text in the Watermark Text. Some items (such as author_url) may not appear if the user hasn’t entered a value for them in their profile.

{site_name}  Displays the name of the site (eg. My WordPress Blog)

{site_description}  Displays the description of the site (eg. A blog about WordPress)

{site_url}  Displays the url of the site (eg. http://8MediaCentral.com)

{admin_email}  Displays the email address of the site admin (eg. test@test.com)

{date_time}  Displays the full date and time of the image upload (eg. 2012-10-24 10:22:18)

{day}  Displays the day of the image upload with two digits  (eg. 24)

{month}  Displays the month of the image upload with two digits  (eg. 10)

{year}  Displays the day of the image upload with four digits  (eg. 2012)

{hour}  Displays the hour of the image upload with two digits – 24h  (eg. 10)

{minute}  Displays the minute of the image upload with two digits  (eg. 22)

{image_title}  Displays the title of the image  (eg. Flowers.jpg)

{author_username}  Displays username of the uploader  (eg. JBloggs)

{author_email}  Displays email address of the uploader  (eg. JBloggs@test.com)

{author_url}  Displays website address of the uploader  (eg. http://JBloggs.8MediaCentral.com)

{author_first_name}  Displays the first name of the uploader  (eg. Joe)

{author_last_name}  Displays the last name of the uploader  (eg. Bloggs)

{author_full_name}  Displays the full name of the uploader  (eg. Joe Bloggs)

Fonts

The following fonts are available in WP Image Protect Premium

 

 

 

 

 

 

F.A.Q.

Q. Are the original images affected by the watermarking process?

A. No. One of the primary features of WP Image Protect Premium is that the original image remains unaffected by the watermarking process. The watermarks are only applied as they are viewed on your site.

Q. There are no errors, but Watermarks are not being displayed

A. Ensure the plugin is activated an you have selected the relevant option from Settings > WP Image Protect Settings in your WordPress administration dashboard.

Q. There is another problem with the plugin

A. Firstly, try de-activating other plugins. There are some plugins which have known compatibility issues with WP Image Protect. If you have tried this and are still having issues please use the contact link (Premium only) or open a ticket on the WordPress.org support forum (Lite only), providing as much detail as possible – the version of WordPress and WP Image Protect you are using and the nature of the problem you are experiencing. I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Q. How do I specify what images are Watermarked/Excluded from Watermarking?

A. By default, watermarks are applied to all uploaded images above the ‘Watermark only Size’ threshold found on the plugin settings page. This ensures that smaller images such as thumbnails are not watermarked. Additionally, you can exclude individual images from the watermarking process by selecting the relevant image from Media > Library in your WordPress administration console and checking ‘WPIPP Exclude from Watermarking’ checkbox and pressing ‘Update’

To submit a query or request a feature, please use the contact link.

Thanks for your support of WP Image Protect Premium, the watermarking plugin for WordPress