Add a Watermark to a Photo
Protect your copyright with text or a logo over the photo. Processing runs on our own server, your files never go to the cloud.
Why you need a watermark
- Protect the copyright of photos in your portfolio
- Brand your photos for marketplaces and social media
- Protect against direct image theft from your site
- Sign a shot with your own logo or handle
Text or image
Text
The simplest and fastest. Prints a studio name, handle or URL. You can set the size, color and opacity.
Image (PNG logo)
For brands with a ready logo. Upload a PNG with a transparent background and we place it in the chosen position with adjustable opacity.
Where to place it
- In a corner, for subtle protection that does not get in the way
- In the center, for maximum protection, especially if the photo is published at full resolution
- Tiled (repeated across the whole image), protection for promo material and rare shots
How to use it
- Upload a photo
- Choose the type (text or logo)
- Enter text or upload a PNG logo
- Tweak the opacity, size and position
- Click Apply
FAQ
Can I remove the watermark later?
From an ordinary photo without the original, no, the watermark is baked into the pixels. Keep the original separately. AI tools like remove objects can remove a mark, but that is for other people's photos, not your own.
Which fonts?
We use the standard system font Open Sans with Cyrillic and Latin support. If you need a brand font, draw it in Photoshop and upload it as a PNG.
Can I do several photos at once?
For now, one at a time. For batch processing of a catalog, reach out in chat.
Any limits?
Up to 25 MB, 30 files per minute, 200 per day per IP.
Related tools
- Signature on a photo, draw a signature by hand or upload a PNG
- Prepare for marketplace
- Remove EXIF
When a watermark helps and when it costs you sales
A watermark solves a narrow problem: it ties an image to its author or brand and makes straight republishing useless to whoever copied it. That is genuinely valuable for a portfolio on your own site, for promo shots on social media, for previews you send a client before payment, and for lookbooks that go out to dealers. In all of those cases the mark behaves like a signature and nobody objects.
The other side is product listings. Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Shopify-based storefronts treat the main product image the same way: the frame must show the product on a clean background with no overlaid text, no logos, no borders and no promotional badges. Amazon in particular suppresses listings whose main image breaks that rule, and a suppressed listing loses its ranking history, which takes weeks to rebuild. Etsy is more permissive in the letter of its policy, but buyers read a heavy watermark as a reseller rather than a maker.
The working rule is simple: mark the images that represent you, leave clean the images that represent the product. Keep two versions of every file, a clean original for the marketplace and a marked one for your site, newsletters and social feeds. Protection then stops competing with sales.
Making a mark subtle without making it useless
Subtle and useless are not the same thing. The difference comes down to four settings that have to be chosen together.
Opacity. For a discreet signature, 25-40% is the working band. Below 20% the mark disappears on busy frames and can be painted out in a couple of minutes. Above 60% it starts arguing with the picture and readers notice it before they notice the subject.
Size. Think in percentages of frame width rather than pixels, so the mark carries the same weight on a 600 px thumbnail and on a 4000 px master. A corner signature usually sits at 12-20% of width, a defensive central mark at 40-60%.
Placement. A corner is the polite choice and also the fragile one, since the bottom right corner is one crop away from gone. If the shot is valuable, place the mark so it crosses the main subject, then cropping it out damages the image itself.
Contrast. White sinks into pale backgrounds, black sinks into dark ones. The most reliable answer is a light mark with a soft drop shadow, or a faint translucent plate behind the text, which stays legible on snow and on black velvet alike.
Judge the result at the size people will actually see, in a feed or an email, not at full zoom.
Protecting a catalogue from copying: what works, what does not
Worth being straight about the limits. A watermark does not stop anyone downloading a file. It makes the copy awkward to reuse and leaves a trail back to the source.
What works. A mark that crosses the object rather than sitting on empty background, because removing it cleanly costs real effort. Publishing at a resolution that is fine for screens and useless for print, roughly 1600-2000 px on the long side. A consistent mark carrying your domain, which quietly returns traffic whenever the image is reposted. And keeping originals with capture dates and signed agreements, since that, not the mark itself, is what settles an authorship dispute.
What does not work. Disabling the right mouse button, which takes two clicks to defeat. A tiny corner badge, which a crop removes. A 10% opacity mark, which automated filters lift. And expecting a watermark to deter industrial scraping of a catalogue, since a scraper simply takes whatever the server hands over.
For an online shop the practical shape is this: clean images on product pages, marked versions in the blog, in PDF catalogues and in mailings, and legal plus server-side measures against wholesale copying. Graphics on top of a picture were never the right tool for that job.
Batch marking and one house style across a catalogue
Once you are past a handful of shots the question changes from how to place a mark to how to place the same mark everywhere. Inconsistency shows immediately: the logo is bigger on one photo, sits in a different corner on the next, carries a different opacity on the third. The catalogue stops looking assembled.
Write a short spec before you start and keep it: the logo file (a PNG with a transparent background and resolution to spare), size as a percentage of width, which corner, the margin from the edge, the opacity. Every image then inherits those numbers instead of being judged by eye.
One detail catches people out, aspect ratio. The same percentage of width carries different visual weight on a square listing image and on a wide banner. If your catalogue mixes formats, split the batch by ratio and run the groups separately.
Order of operations matters too. Retouch, colour and crop first, resize for the destination second, watermark last. Mark it earlier and the placement shifts during cropping and softens during downscaling.
This tool handles files one at a time, which is fine for a dozen frames. For runs in the hundreds we apply the marking to your spec on our side, just ask in chat.