it's been a while, but i don't think i did. i ended up compromising on image quality and not using .photo for preset. IIRC, that reduced the overal resolution, didn't result in complaints by the system about the size of the watermark, and was good enough.

The size of the image and the watermark UIView is the same as the resolution of the exported image: 3024 x 4032. I have no idea where the 9072 x 12096 comes from in the error. It's obviously the size/resolution times three, but I have no idea why it's doing that. If I remove the watermark logic, then my code does no multiplication at all — the multiplication takes place in the watermark to ensure the text is scaled properly with the size of the image (doesn't appear super small).

I don't get it, why not just use the height that I give you explicitly. There's no need for estimation when I've given you the exact height for each and every index path. I just spent a day fixing a bug that was the result of this estimation logic. If all the cells are the same height — which isn't uncommon — then the estimation should just be the item count times the height. The estimation it was calculating for my table view was nearly twice the actual content size???