Add a watermark

What a watermark can and cannot do

A visible watermark makes it obvious who an image belongs to and discourages casual reuse. It also makes a photo less attractive to lift for a stock site or a listing. It does not make an image impossible to copy, and a small watermark tucked in a corner can be cropped out in seconds. If protecting your work is the goal, the watermark needs to sit over the part of the image that matters, or repeat across the whole thing.

The tool above adds text watermarks. It works on images and on every page of a PDF, so a set of proofs, a draft contract or a portfolio PDF can all be marked in one pass.

Choosing position, size and opacity

• Corner placement at 30 to 40% opacity is the polite option for photography previews, social posts and anything where you still want the picture to look good.
• Centre placement in larger text, still at low opacity, is appropriate for client proofs where the intention is that the unwatermarked version has to be purchased.
• Diagonal, tiled coverage is the right choice for documents: "DRAFT", "CONFIDENTIAL", "SAMPLE" or "NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION" repeated across every page cannot be cropped away and survives printing and photocopying.

Opacity is the setting people most often get wrong. A fully opaque stamp looks heavy and distracts from the content. Somewhere between 25% and 45% keeps the text legible while letting the image show through. White text with a little opacity reads well on dark photos; dark text works on bright product shots and documents.

Size relative to the image

The font size is applied in pixels of the source image, so the same setting looks different on a 800 pixel web image and a 6,000 pixel camera original. Use the live preview to judge, and if you are watermarking a mixed batch, group images of a similar size together so one setting suits them all. For PDF pages the size is applied in points on the page, which is consistent across documents.

Practical uses

• Marking property listing photos with an agency name so they are not reused by competitors.
• Stamping "SAMPLE" across product mock-ups sent to a client before payment.
• Adding a photographer credit to images before they go on social media.
• Labelling internal PDFs "CONFIDENTIAL" before circulation.
• Marking a batch of design concepts "DRAFT" so early versions are not mistaken for final artwork.

Watermarked files are re-encoded, so for photos choose a high quality setting. The watermark is drawn into the pixels themselves, which is exactly why it cannot be removed by stripping metadata.