How to create a free download at specific size with optional watermark

With the Digital Downloads add-on, there are many unique setups you can offer to customers. A common one photographers using Sunshine Photo Cart for their client galleries will set up is a free, small sized download with a watermark. The goal of this is to entice their customers to share photos from a session and encourage more people to come to the site and buy prints or watermark free digital files.

In this example, I will be configuring a new product called "Social Media" but only make it available as a free download and it will not be available for sale. When a gallery has the option set to enable free downloads (single images or entire gallery), the full resolution image will no longer be available and instead be replaced with an image based on the settings for this digital download product.

You can follow these steps to create multiple free images to be included in each free download if you wish.

Setting up the free download product

You can follow the same steps on how to create a digital download product for your client galleries, with a few slight differences for our needs here. Below you will see the initial digital product set up where the "Type" is set to "Digital Download".

If you do not want to sell this item and only make it available for download, simply leave all the prices empty.

Configure the digital download product options

Next, click the Download tab to get to the additional options for your digital download product. You will configure your dimensions (I have set 600x600), enable the Watermark option if you want, and enable the Free Download option.

You can also enable the All orders option to include this download product size in all purchased downloads as well.

You're all set! When your client clicks the free download link for an image in their gallery, they will get an image download that matches the settings here: a 600x600 (keeping proportional dimensions) with a watermark based on your watermark settings applied.