Darkroom App Moves to Subscription Model, Gets Watermarking and Expanded Icon Picker

The Darkroom photo editing app for iOS has moved to a subscription payment model for new users and introduced new watermarking capabilities and an expanded icon picker.

Starting today, anyone who paid for a Darkroom feature will have access to all premium features for free. This even applies to users who purchased a single filter set years ago. New users will need to pay $3.99 per month or $19.99 per year to unlock every filter and tool in Darkroom. If you prefer, a one time payment of $49.99 is an option.

The team behind Darkroom is hoping that subscriptions will increase their revenue so they can hire more people, invest more heavily in their infrastructure, and expand the scope of their ambition. In three years Darkroom has shipped 51 updates, of which nineteen were major releases.


Here's a look at the new features in the Darkroom 4.4 update:

Watermark your Photos (Premium)
Last year we added to ability to add copyright information to the EXIF metadata on export. For a more explicit form of protection, many people have written us asking for a watermarking feature. This makes total sense, particularly in a world dominated by social media where images are often stolen and re-shared without credit. Darkroom’s Watermark is a full-featured watermarking tool that allows you to set a text or image watermark, and control its size, location, opacity, and even typeface.



Customize your App Icon (Premium)
It doesn’t hurt to have a bit of fun now and then :) Those who have been following us for a while know that every year or so we tend to give our brand a big overhaul to reflect major changes to the app. Now you can pick from old favorites or fun new interpretations of our icon. We’ve included 10 options in a couple flavors:
● We added the app icons for all of our previous release so please enjoy that Neon icon you all loved so much!
● Yes, we even added our internal development build icon, which we once accidentally released publicly
● Lastly we added 4 fresh variations for you all to play with, we are big fans of the Vintage one.




Export Summary (Free)
Now you can see a short summary of your most important options when exporting a photo, such as export file type and quality, is watermark or copyright metadata protection added etc. Granted, this addition is subtle, but combines seamlessly with our Watermark addition, and gives us some headroom for future export additions.

You can download Darkroom from the App Store for free.

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