Secure server conversion
Add a Watermark to an Image
Put your name, your logo or a copyright line onto an image. You see the result as you adjust it, and the finished file is made on our server, which deletes your photo as soon as it is done — worth knowing, since the pictures people watermark are usually ones they have not published yet.
Drag & drop an image here
Up to 20 MB per file
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A PNG with a transparent background works best. A JPG logo brings its white box with it.
Measured against the image, so the same setting looks right on a phone photo and a 6000-pixel original.
Much harder to crop or clone out than a single corner mark.
Step by step
How to watermark an image in 4 steps
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Add your image
The preview appears immediately.
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Type your text, or upload a logo
A PNG with a transparent background works best for a logo.
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Adjust size, opacity, angle and position
Adjust size, opacity, angle and position until it looks right. The preview is a real render, not an approximation.
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Apply and download
The full-resolution version is produced when you save, not while you drag the sliders.
Good to know
What a watermark can and cannot do
What a watermark actually does
It is worth being straight about this, because a lot of tools imply otherwise: a watermark does not protect your image. Anyone determined to take it can crop, clone or inpaint the mark out, and current software makes that easy.
What a watermark does do is worth having anyway:
- It deters casual reuse. Most unauthorised use is not theft by a determined adversary — it is somebody grabbing a convenient image. A mark makes yours inconvenient.
- It travels with the picture. When an image is reposted without a credit, the watermark is the only thing still saying who made it.
- It marks a proof as a proof. This is the most useful case by far: a client sees the work, and the unmarked file arrives when the invoice is paid.
- It survives screenshots, which is more than metadata credit does.
Judge the settings against that goal. A mark heavy enough to make removal genuinely hard also ruins the image, which is why proofs use large diagonal tiled marks and published work uses a small corner one.
Size is measured against the image, not in pixels
This is the detail that makes a watermark tool usable on real photographs, and its absence is why so many produce disappointing results.
A watermark set at a fixed 24 pixels is a readable caption on a 600-pixel web image, an illegible speck on a 6000-pixel camera original, and a band across a 200-pixel thumbnail. People rarely watermark images that are all the same size, so a fixed setting is wrong for most of the batch.
Here the size is a percentage of the image's shorter side, so 5% means the same visible proportion whatever you feed it. The shorter side rather than the width, because otherwise the same setting would look modest on a landscape photo and overbearing on a portrait crop of the same scene.
Corner or tiled
A corner mark is unobtrusive and appropriate for work you are publishing. It is also the easiest to remove — a crop often does it, which is why the bottom of an image is the worst place to put anything you care about.
A tiled mark repeats across the whole frame, usually at an angle. It is much harder to remove because there is no clean region to sample from, and it is unmistakably a proof. Alternate rows are offset by half a step rather than sitting on a strict grid: a plain grid leaves straight gutters that are easy to reconstruct from, and it looks mechanical.
Quality
Output quality and legibility
The image is redrawn once, at full resolution, when you press apply — not repeatedly as you adjust the sliders. So moving things around costs nothing, and the file is encoded exactly once.
PNG in, PNG out. A PNG keeps its transparency, so a watermarked logo or graphic does not acquire a white background. Everything else is saved as a high-quality JPEG, because a watermarked photograph saved as PNG is often ten times the size for no visible gain.
Getting it legible without making it ugly
- Opacity around 35–50% is the usual sweet spot. Below 20% it disappears against a busy photo; above 70% it stops looking like a watermark and starts looking like a sticker.
- Leave the shadow on for text. White text over a pale sky is invisible without it, and the instinctive fix — raising the opacity until it shows — produces a much uglier result than a subtle shadow does.
- White or black, rarely a colour. A neutral mark reads as a mark; a coloured one competes with the picture.
- Watermark last. Crop and resize first, then watermark, then compress. Watermarking before a crop risks cutting the mark in half.
Compression and watermarks
A hard-edged mark over a smooth area is exactly the pattern JPEG handles worst, so heavy compression afterwards can leave visible speckling around the letters. If you are compressing hard for the web, keep the mark reasonably large and avoid thin fonts — or compress at a gentler setting.
Choosing a mark
For client proofs
Go large, tiled and diagonal, at 30–45% opacity. The point is that the proof is unusable as a final image while remaining perfectly clear to review. Nobody is offended by an obvious proof mark; they are only annoyed if they cannot see the work underneath.
For published photographs
Small, in a corner, 30–40% opacity, in white or black. Your name or your site, nothing more. The aim is a credit that survives a repost, not a barrier.
For a logo
Use a PNG with a transparent background. A JPG logo carries its white box with it, which will sit on your photograph as a white rectangle — the single most common disappointment with logo watermarks, and there is no fixing it at this stage: the transparency has to be in the file you upload.
Where not to put it
The bottom edge is the default nearly everywhere and the least effective place, because cropping the bottom strip is the first thing anybody does. If removal is a real concern, put the mark somewhere it overlaps the subject — a corner of the frame is convenient precisely because it contains nothing important, and that is the same reason it is easy to lose.
Watermarks and metadata are different things
A watermark is visible and survives screenshots and re-encoding. Metadata credit is invisible, searchable and machine-readable — and is stripped by nearly every social platform on upload.
They cover different failure modes, so use both if attribution matters: the watermark for people, the metadata for software. You can see what your files currently carry with the metadata viewer, and strip it with remove EXIF data when you would rather not publish your camera serial number and the coordinates of your house.
Privacy
What happens to your file
This tool runs on our server, so it works the same on every phone and computer. Your file is uploaded, and this is exactly what happens to it:
- Stored outside the public web root under a random name, never under your file's name.
- Processed, with the original upload deleted immediately — whether it succeeded or failed.
- The result sits behind a signed link that only you receive, which stops working after 20 minutes, and the file is deleted the moment you download it.
- Anything never collected is deleted automatically within 30 minutes.
- The image itself is never logged or kept. If a conversion fails, we record the formats involved and the error — not the file.
- Camera metadata, including any GPS coordinates recording where a photo was taken, is removed from the result. Only the rotation needed to show the image the right way up is kept.
Questions & answers
Add Watermark: frequently asked questions
Does a watermark stop people stealing my images?
No, and it is worth being clear about that. Anyone determined can crop or clone the mark out, and current software makes it easy. What a watermark does is deter casual reuse, carry your credit when an image is reposted, and mark a proof as a proof — which is genuinely useful even though it is not protection.
Are my photos uploaded to your server?
Yes. The watermark is drawn in your browser as you adjust it, and the finished image is made on our server so that it works the same on every device. Your upload is deleted the moment the watermarked image is made, that image is deleted as soon as you download it, and no one looks at your images.
Why is the size a percentage instead of pixels?
Because a fixed pixel size is wrong for almost every batch. Twenty-four pixels is a readable caption on a small web image, an illegible speck on a 6000-pixel camera original, and a band across a thumbnail. A percentage of the shorter side gives the same visible proportion at any size.
What opacity should I use?
Around 35–50% for most images. Below 20% it vanishes against a busy photograph; above 70% it stops reading as a watermark and starts looking like a sticker. If pale text is hard to see, leave the shadow on rather than raising the opacity — the shadow keeps it legible without making it heavy.
My logo has a white box around it. Why?
Because it is a JPG. JPEG cannot store transparency, so the background is baked in as white pixels and comes along with the logo. Use a PNG with a genuine transparent background — this cannot be fixed at watermarking time, the transparency has to already be in the file.
Should I watermark before or after resizing?
Resize first, then watermark, then compress. Watermarking before a crop risks cutting the mark in half, and a mark applied to a large original then scaled down can end up smaller than you intended relative to the final image.
Can I watermark several images at once?
Not yet — this tool works on one image at a time so the preview stays honest about what you are getting. Batch watermarking is on the list.
Keep going
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