How to Add a Watermark to Protect Your Images
A watermark will not stop someone determined to steal an image. What it does is make casual reuse awkward and keep your name attached when a picture travels somewhere you did not send it. The Image Editor adds text over a photo without uploading it anywhere.
Be honest about what it achieves
Anyone with ten minutes and ordinary software can remove a watermark from a corner, and the more sophisticated tools can do it from a flat background in seconds. So the realistic goals are deterrence and attribution: making an image annoying enough to lift that someone picks a different one, and making sure that if it does spread, your name goes with it.
If an image genuinely must not be reused, a watermark is the wrong tool. Publishing it at a size too small to be useful, or not publishing it at all, is the only reliable approach.
Where to put it
The corner is conventional and it is also the first thing a thief crops off. A watermark that survives cropping has to overlap something that cannot be removed - across the subject, or running diagonally through the middle. That is more intrusive, which is exactly the trade you are making.
A reasonable compromise for most work: bottom corner, inset far enough from the edge that a small crop does not take it, at an opacity low enough to read without competing with the picture. Around twenty to forty per cent opacity is usually right. If the viewer notices your watermark before your photograph, it is too strong.
Keep it consistent
The same text, the same position, the same weight across everything you publish is what turns a watermark into recognition rather than clutter. Decide once and apply it the same way, and keep an unwatermarked master of every image - clients, printers and licensing all need the clean version.
Common questions
Will a watermark hurt my search rankings?
No. Search engines read the file name, the alt text and the surrounding page, not marks drawn onto the pixels. Keep the alt text accurate and the watermark is irrelevant to ranking.
Should I watermark photos of people?
For client work, usually only on previews. A watermark across a face is a poor advertisement for your photography, and most clients will ask for a clean copy anyway.
Can I watermark a batch of images?
Not in one pass here - the editor works on one image at a time, which is also what lets you place the mark to suit each photograph. For a large set, consistency of position matters more than speed.
Does adding a watermark reduce quality?
The re-save does, slightly, because it is another compression pass. Work from your original rather than from an already-compressed copy, and the difference is invisible.
What should the watermark say?
Your name or your site, nothing more. A long line of text in several lines reads as clutter and gets cropped out anyway.
Ready to put your name on your work?