Could we use the term "watermarking" for a process which near-invisibly marks the image? We could use the term "branding" for the visual counterpart.

Nice approach.

I need to get JAWS out to confirm, but based on the resulting page source, I'm pretty sure that when JS is disabled in the browser you might break the page from an accessibility perspective by using this tool.

If this did degrade in a more elegant way, i think this would be a very practical tool.

It is warned somewhat in the readme.md, which also mentions it could more interestingly be used in CMS admin pages to watermark images during upload, when the server for whatever reason is not capable. The original would then never be accessible to the public.

So it certainly has its uses.

Edit: I see this point was made already in that other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545601

And, it doesn’t even help much, as the actual image is still accessible to the browser, unless executed on the server.

Yeah that was my other concern, but like all forms of DRM, it's pretty much broken from the start so initially I didn't think it was worth pointing out. I'm glad you did though.

It's an important and likely not obvious point to some people that as the image is being modified in JS, the original image is locally accessible regardless of the watermark if the viewer is even just a little tech savvy. Might be good for getting credit on printed pages, but its certainly not a complete solution.

Isn't it kind of obvious that if you want to modify something in the browser, the browser must be able to load it?

There is no standard for "trusted" downloads yet, in the sense that everyone except the user is "trusted" nowadays... I'm sure it will come though.

To you and me for sure, but a photographer who is not familiar with how JS is executed, I would say its possible they might miss the issue and just focus on the result.

There is one, with HTML5 DRM, but again, this is only code running in userspace on your computer, so any CompSci student can just disassemble it and get the image again.