Publish master renditions from Lightroom - watermarks on thumbnails

I’ve been trying to speed up my workflow, publishing large galleries from Lightroom takes around 10 seconds per image and often my galleries contain upwards of 1200 images which have to be uploaded quickly ready for sales (event photography). I’ve made this run faster by selecting the “publish master renditions from Lightroom” in admin/publisher settings.

This cuts the publishing from Lightroom down to around 5 seconds per image, but all the gallery thumbnails have a watermark showing on them. In Lightroom publisher>features I’ve selected “exclude watermarks in thumbnails” but I assume that Backlight is overriding this. I’ve also noticed that images that are published to the /photos-for-purchase folder on the server also carry a watermark (I can get round this by just overwriting these images via FTP once everything is published).

Not a biggie, I’d rather have increased publishing speed but is there something I’m missing or anything I can do to prevent the watermark from appearing on the gallery thumbnails?

Hi @kubicixfactor, that’s just how it is when using master renditions from LR. There is only a single rendition, so if you’ve configured LR Publisher to add watermarks then that rendition and all those created from it on the server will have the watermark.

Backlight 4 will include a change that allows master renditions from LR to use watermarks configured in the Album Template in Backlight’s admin. That will allow different ways of managing watermarks:

  1. Only use the watermarks from LR, with the behaviour that you’re seeing now
  2. Only use the watermarks from Backlight, which will allow them to be applied to specific renditions as set in the template designer
  3. Use both approaches, which can result in two watermarks applied to each image, using the same conditions in 1. and 2.
  4. Use neither

Thanks for clarifying Ben, I’ll look forward to BL4!