Digital watermark encoding—and associated registry transactions—are made transparent to consumers—performed as built-in features of common image processing operations, such as taking a picture, or printing a picture. In one arrangement, a user interacts with buttons and other controls of a graphical user interface on the touchscreen of a printer to author specific experiences that should be triggered by a hardcopy image—such as launching a related video, playing a recorded audio clip, displaying other images in a story narrative to which the hardcopy image relates, etc. The printer then attends to interactions with network infrastructure components needed to give the hardcopy print the user-desired functionality. In another arrangement, the content experience triggered by a printed image is authored automatically, e.g., by reference to data mined from the image's online context (e.g., Facebook photo album). A great variety of other features and arrangements are also detailed.