Friday, March 29, 2024

ShotOn review: Automatic photo stamps to show off your phone

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Apparently there’s a new trend developing among people who love to shoot photos with their smartphone. And that’s adding a “Shot on” custom watermark on your pictures. Want all your friends to know you shot that gorgeous image using your trusty Huawei Mate 10 or Pixel phone? Or maybe you’re looking to protect your vision and prevent your work from being used without consent?. Then you’ll definitely want to try the ShotOn app.

Setup

Simply download the app from the Google Play Store. But before you go ahead and do that, let us tell you this is a paid app. It costs $0.99 to download and use. Sure, a free version of the app is also available (here), but you won’t be able to use all the features.

Impressions

Once you open the app, it will show you a quick tutorial, so you can sense what it can do.

At first, you need to select the phone you’re using. There are a few pre-set options including the Google Pixel, Huawei Mate 10, Moto G5S+, Nokia 8 or Samsung J7.

If you want to play by the rules, you’ll pick exactly the model you have. But you don’t necessarily have to.

Once you’ve selected the type of phone you’re using to shoot your images, you can go on and customize the look of the watermark and what it says.

Basically, the stamp says “Shot on X phone model, by Your name”, but you can easily change that. Use the Settings section located in the upper right corner to Change the text and Change the logo, which appears on the left side of the text. You can opt for any logo you like, regardless of the phone you’re actually using.

ShotOn: watermarking photos made easy

The app includes a bunch of options to customize the stamp. You can choose the location of the watermark (left, right, middle, etc) and you can also easily change the text font and colors.

The app works as intended, although at times it’s a bit difficult to arrange the stamp in the right position using only the X, Y coordinates provided. Or to adjust the size.

Because the logo, “Shot On” text and “By your name” text each come with their own set of X, Y coordinates, sometimes they can overlap. Or stretch beyond the screen. This makes your job a little bit difficult and can easily lead to frustration.

I would have liked to be able to simply drag and drop the watermark and pinch it in an out to resize the logo and texts. It would have led to a more seamless experience.

Anyway, apart from stamp creation, the app also lets you auto apply the Watermark on all new photos.

You simply have to choose your preferred stamp and select the camera folder path. So the app will know to apply the watermark whenever you use a certain camera app. A message will be displayed once the watermark has been successfully applied to an image you just snapped.

The app will automatically stamp the default watermark (although you can tweak the text), so if you want to customize the size or color of the stamp, you’ll have to take the image first and edit later. The auto feature seems to work with some apps, but not with others.

You’re also supposed to be able to save the images stamped with the customized watermark from the app, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find them in my gallery after I had done so. That’s probably due to some sort of bug.

Conclusions

Overall the app delivers what was promised: you can stamp your photos with a watermark which lets viewers know who took the photo and using which device.

However, you can customize the text to say whatever you want. So if you wish to communicate something else entirely, you can.

You’re also not restricted to using the logo of the company which produced your smartphone, as the app does not recognize your device.

The problem with Shot on is that anyone with basic Photoshop skills could do what the app does within minutes. With perhaps better results. So the auto-stamp feature is probably the only highlight of this app.

Indeed not everyone uses Photoshop, so if you want to be able to easily apply custom stamps on your images, then this app is for you.

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