[VladVladikoff]

I don’t get it? Wouldn’t figuring out a simple FFMPEG command to watermark an image (or video) take less time than integrating with an API to do it? Plus if you had to do a lot of images it would be much faster to work locally than having to ship the images remotely somewhere. -someone who does this a lot, specifically for videos.

[lembergs]

You're 100% right for your use case. FFMPEG locally will always be faster than shipping images over the network.

But we're solving different problems. You're working with local files you already have. I'm targeting apps where images are already living in S3/R2 somewhere — user uploads a product photo, SaaS needs to watermark it before displaying, that kind of thing.

In those cases the alternative isn't "run FFMPEG locally" — it's download from S3 to your server, run Sharp or FFMPEG, upload back to S3, manage worker queues when traffic spikes, handle retries when things fail. Basically all the plumbing around the actual watermarking.

For your workflow this API makes zero sense. Local batch processing with FFMPEG is objectively better. No argument there. But if you're building a SaaS where users are uploading images and you need to watermark them server-side, would you rather write all that infrastructure or pay a penny per image and ship your actual product features faster? That's the bet I'm making.

Might be totally wrong! But "pay someone to handle the boring infrastructure" has worked for Stripe, Twilio, AWS Lambda, etc. Same play here but for image processing.

[razingeden]

non watermarked content can reside on an s3 bucket or http path, referenced by squid as the origin server, which is Icap Aware , and you can run any command on the content;

Antivirus, ffmpeg to watermark a doc … or indeed a third party API..

it’s most commonly used to do antivirus on a transparent proxy and block infected file downloads but you can run any command you want.

Including watermarking everything with a company logo , “confidential “ , or a unique ID of the requestor.

or making subtle alterations to md5sums , metadata etc in confidential documents or for each requestor to track down leaks and sharing.

Nakivo does something kind of like that with product downloads (executables) to manipulate them and require a specific file name to install that goes back to the info you furnished for a demo.

All sorts of use cases for these alterations, I wouldn’t necessarily abandon an idea that’s interesting or challenging to you and id encourage you to spend a little more time on whether youve considered them all and whether they’re marketable

Then if it’s not interesting as a standalone product it might be something you can bake into a paid CMS plugin (Wordpress, Xenforo, etc) for people who are savvy enough to deploy those kinds of products but maybe not go this far with it.

My bread and butter , I guess.. isn’t something mass marketable , but it’s something i enjoy, am wired for, and never really get burned out or bored of.