About Image Watermark
Watermarking a photo before it goes anywhere public is the ordinary case, and doing it on a site that uploads your photo first is a strange trade — you hand the original to a stranger in order to protect it from strangers. Everything here happens in your browser, and the file never moves.
Two details separate a watermark that looks deliberate from one that looks dropped on. Size is expressed as a share of the image's shorter side rather than in pixels, so the same setting works on a thumbnail and a forty-megapixel photograph. And placement uses the mark's rotated bounding box, because a rotated rectangle occupies more vertical space than an upright one — ignore that and a tilted watermark drifts off the edge as the angle increases.
The optional drop shadow exists for a specific reason: a pale watermark disappears over a pale region of a photo. A soft dark shadow keeps it readable across a whole image without resorting to an opaque box behind it.
How to watermark an image
Add your photo
The preview is the real thing, drawn at full resolution and scaled to fit the page.
Type your mark
A name, a handle or a copyright line. Set the colour and position.
Tune it
Size scales with the image. Lower opacity is less intrusive; rotation and tiling are harder to crop out.
Download
PNG at the original resolution, so the image is not degraded by the watermarking step.
Making a watermark that is hard to remove
- Tile it. A single corner mark takes one crop to defeat; a repeating pattern has to be painted out across the whole image.
- Cross the subject. A mark over an empty background is trivial to clone out — over detail, far less so.
- Keep opacity low but not invisible. Around 30–50% is legible without ruining the picture.
- Rotate it. Diagonal text is harder for automated removal to reconstruct than horizontal.
- Accept the trade honestly: the harder a watermark is to remove, the more it interferes with looking at the photo.