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Sift

Watermarks

Watermarks is where you set up the scan that finds a Site’s watermark on your files. To open it, go to Settings > Watermarks.

Come here to see how many files are scanned, or to choose what the scan runs on. The scan uses the PP-OCRv4 models, on your computer.

The Watermarks pane in Settings

On this pane

Section titled “On this pane”

The first rows have no heading: the switch, how many files are scanned, when it runs, and More settings. The switch is turned on and off in Settings > Tasks and Activity > Import tasks > Identify settings. Then the pane draws one group:

  • Start over: delete the watermark results.

Rows the pane draws by hand

Section titled “Rows the pane draws by hand”
  • More settings: Edit opens what Sift runs the scan on, and a fresh copy of the models. A download that can’t connect shows why and what to check. It uses the proxy set in Windows, or in HTTPS_PROXY. A proxy set by an automatic configuration script isn’t read.
  • Watermark results: Delete results deletes the results, so the next scan checks every file again.

Every setting

Section titled “Every setting”

Scan files for Site watermarks

Section titled “Scan files for Site watermarks”

Finds a Site’s watermark printed on a file and adds that Site to the file. A watermark shows where a copy came from, never who is in it.

Sift ships no watermark models. When you choose Download the models, Sift downloads the PP-OCRv4 mobile pair, published by Baidu as part of PaddleOCR, from Hugging Face. The download is about 12 MB. The models recognize the Latin alphabet only, so a watermark in another script isn’t found.

Run watermark scans on

Section titled “Run watermark scans on”

A GPU makes a scan about a fifth faster at most, because most of the time goes to opening files.

Sift ships the CPU-only build of its model runtime, so the GPU can’t be used until the GPU’s own runtime is added. Sift can download it under GPU in Settings > Performance. It’s about 1.3 GB, downloaded once and stored next to your libraries, so an update doesn’t remove it and a new library needs nothing. It needs an NVIDIA GPU and a current driver, and nothing else installed by hand.