Text or logo
A text watermark is the quickest: a copyright line, a name or a web address. Size is the font size as a percent of the picture's width: at 5% the font size is 40 pixels on a picture 800 pixels wide and 200 pixels on one 4000 pixels wide, so the text keeps the same proportions on a phone photo and on a large scan. That is how a batch keeps one look. Opacity is for the mark as a whole: at 50% the mark is half see-through, and the outline, the fill and the shadow do not add up to darker patches where they overlap.
- Colour and legibility. White text with a soft shadow reads on most photos. On pale pictures use dark text. The outline option draws a thin line around the letters, which helps on busy backgrounds.
- Languages. Text can be in any script your device has a font for. Right to left lines such as Arabic and Hebrew are shaped and ordered correctly, and each line gets the direction of its own first letter. Emoji draw in colour on devices that have an emoji font. The text can run over several lines.
- Fonts. The choices are the system sans-serif, Inter and Bricolage Grotesque (the fonts of this site), Arial or Helvetica, a serif and a monospace font. System fonts differ a little between Windows, macOS, Android and Linux, so the preview shows what your device will save.
- A logo. Use a PNG or SVG with a see-through background for the cleanest result. A JPG logo keeps its background, which shows as a box. The logo keeps its own proportions, and its size is again a percent of the picture's width.
One mark or a pattern
For a single mark, choose one of the nine cells of the picture: corners, edges or the middle. The margin is the distance from the edge, as a percent of the width, and the mark's outer edge touches it. A rotation turns the mark and keeps it inside the margins. On a very wide, low picture the margin never takes more than a quarter of the height, and a mark that is bigger than the room inside the margins is drawn smaller so it fits, never cut off; the result tells you when that happened.
The repeat option covers the picture with the mark in a diagonal pattern. Rows are shifted by half a step so no straight columns show, and the pattern is centred on the picture. Spacing is the gap between marks as a percent of the width. A smaller spacing and a bigger mark mean a denser pattern. The default angle is a gentle slope, which is easy to read and hard to ignore.
A pattern is harder to crop out than a corner mark, because there is no corner to cut away. It also changes the picture more, so keep the opacity low enough that the picture is still pleasant to look at.
What a watermark can and cannot do
A visible watermark discourages casual copying and tells people where a picture came from. It does not make a picture impossible to take. A mark in a corner can be cropped. A mark over the picture can be painted over, covered or reduced with editing tools, and some of them do this automatically. A repeated pattern makes that more work, and it is still not a lock.
- Keep your original files. The watermark is part of the saved picture and cannot be taken out of it again.
- Share pictures at the size people need. A smaller picture with a mark is less useful to copy than a full size one. The Image Compressor can make a smaller copy.
- Copyright information in the file's metadata (the author and rights fields) is easy to strip, which is why a visible mark can help. To see or remove what a picture carries, use Image Metadata.
Formats, quality and edge cases
The mark is drawn at the picture's full resolution, so the saved picture has the same pixel size as the original. Each picture is saved in its own format unless you pick another: JPG at quality 92, WebP at 90, PNG without loss. JPG and WebP are saved again, so they lose a little detail. PNG loses none but can be larger than the original. HEIC and TIFF pictures are saved as JPG, and GIF, BMP, SVG and icon files as PNG. AVIF pictures stay AVIF, which takes longer to save.
- Metadata. Camera details, date and GPS location are removed by default, because saving a picture again does not carry them over. Choose Keep to copy the EXIF block from JPG, PNG and WebP originals. Rotation is applied to the picture, so the copied value is reset to upright. The small preview picture that cameras store inside the EXIF block is left out, because it shows the picture without your watermark.
- Animations. An animated GIF, WebP or PNG gets the mark on its first frame only and is saved as a still picture. The list says so for each animation.
- Transparency. Transparent areas get the mark too. A JPG cannot be transparent, so see-through areas are filled with white.
- Big pictures. Pictures up to 100 megapixels are accepted. A very large one in a pattern takes longer, and a phone may run out of memory sooner than a desktop computer. You will see a plain message if that happens.