Hide watermark for wholesalers

Question

I want to add a watermark to my images in the store. But when a dealer is logged in, he must see the original images. The dealer are in the customer group Dealers.

Is it possible to hide the watermark for the dealers / a customer group?

I have been searching for this, but I cannot find it.

Answer 1

The water mark is set in the method Mage_Catalog_Helper_Image::init by these lines:

    $this->setWatermark(
        Mage::getStoreConfig("design/watermark/{$this->_getModel()->getDestinationSubdir()}_image")
    );
    $this->setWatermarkImageOpacity(
        Mage::getStoreConfig("design/watermark/{$this->_getModel()->getDestinationSubdir()}_imageOpacity")
    );
    $this->setWatermarkPosition(
        Mage::getStoreConfig("design/watermark/{$this->_getModel()->getDestinationSubdir()}_position")
    );
    $this->setWatermarkSize(
        Mage::getStoreConfig("design/watermark/{$this->_getModel()->getDestinationSubdir()}_size")
    );

You can try to rewrite this method and wrap the code above in an if statement that checks if the current user belongs to a certain group.
Something like this:

$dealerCustomerGroupIds = array(9, 10);
if (!in_array(Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomerGroupId(),  $dealerCustomerGroupIds)) {
    //the code from above goes here
}

Of course this is a quick and dirty way of doing it. It would be cleaner to have a field in the system->configuration from where you can select the user groups that should not see watermarks. Then read that setting and populate the $dealerCustomerGroupIds variable. I just added the code here as a proof of concept.