Image: Watermark creates duplicate images & "multiplies" the watermark burn

Hello everyone,

I think that this is a timestamp thing but i want to be sure.

I have water marks on all the stock photography on my site at http://www.buzzyolfactive.com

Now, as i was new to drupal, and wanted to prevent people stealing my images, i asked drupal to upload the images and burn watermarks on the previews only... My big images are on a protected portion of the site, so i just thought to delete the originals that are left alone in the files/image folder.

1st problem, because i removed those images, when i went in to edit them, I would "lose" them. ugh... so after deleting 2,000 of them, i had to put them pack... no problem, i thought, i will batch rename the previews to exclude ".preview" and copy them to the server. problem solved

2nd problem... people started to complain that they couldn't see the images because of the water mark. i thought that was kind good until i went to the site and saw that my transparencies were almost completely opaque... also, i had water marks on the thumbnails... where i didn't have them before... ugh? what was going on?

I realized that this was happening to all the images that i "updated"... any gallery that i added after that batch rename is working just fine... so

the only thing that i can think of is does the watermark module compare the images timestamp to see if it should be burned? because I have multiples (with the addition of a .1 or a .2 appending the file name before the extension)

how can i fix this... as all the images are product nodes that are for sale and i don't want to screw up the db...

thanks for you help before hand....

oh, and DRUPAL ROCKS !!! trying to clear my schedule to meet everyone in BOSTON!