Watermarking Images Acorn

Let me introduce you to Retrobatch

Before we talk about how to batch process images with Acorn, let me first introduce you to Retrobatch. Retrobatch is a separate app made by us (the folks who made Acorn), and is dedicated to batch image processing. It works on 10, 100, or even thousands of images at once. You can add text, add watermarks, resize, and output to many different formats. If you have some heavy duty batch processing that needs to be done, you should really check it out.

More information can be found in Retrobatch's documentation.

Shortcuts & Acorn

Acorn comes with a number of actions you can use from the Shortcuts app. One such action is named "Image Overlay" which you can see blow:

With this action you can specify an image to use as a watermark, and even position or rotate it. Here's how to use it.

First, open up the Shortcuts app, and create a new shortcut via the File ▸ New Shortcut menu item. You will get an empty window which is a nice blank slate for us to start with. If you'd like, you can click in the title bar and rename it to something like "Watermark Images".

Next, you'll want to drag in your image, or folder of images onto the blank area of the shortcut. In this example, we're going to use a folder named "Shortcut Images". Once you've added it to the blank area, it will look like this:

Next we're going to want to loop over every image in our folder, and for that we'll add the "Repeat with Each" action. A simple search of "repeat" in the action library search field will locate it for us. We can then drag and drop that into our action area and your shortcut will now look like this:

Notice the line between the top folder action and the Repeat action. This indicates that the items in the folder will be passed to the repeat action.

Next, we're going to do a search for "acorn" in the action library. You'll find a list of various actions from Acorn that you can use. Locate the one titled "Overlay Image" and drag and drop that between the "Repeat" and "End Repeat" actions. See below:

Next, click on the blue text titled "Overlay Image" in our Overlay action. This will allow us to select an image to use for our watermark. In this example, we're going to use the Flying Meat logo. If you don't have a logo, you can use this one: Flying Meat Watermark.png

And then as a last step, we're going to add a "Close Image" action. This is so we don't open up 100 images all at once in Acorn. Your shortcut should look like the following:

One extra step is to tweak where the overlay image goes. If you click the text that says "Show More" on the Overlay action, you'll get some expanded options like below:

With these options you can change the position of the watermark image, rotation, and the opacity (aka, transparency).

And that's it! You can now run your shortcut.