How to Add a Watermark to Your Photos
A watermark won't stop someone determined to steal a photo — nothing short of not posting it will do that — but it does two useful things a lot of photographers and small sellers care about: it makes the source obvious at a glance, and it discourages the casual "right click, save, repost with no credit" behavior that's honestly most of what happens to unwatermarked images online.
Steps
- Open the Image Watermark Tool and upload your photo.
- Type your watermark text — a name, a handle, a short copyright line.
- Adjust the size, opacity, and position until it sits where you want.
- Download the result.
The opacity/placement trade-off
There's a real tension here: a bold, high-opacity watermark placed dead center is the hardest to remove, but it also ruins the photo for anyone who might otherwise want to license or credit it properly. Most working photographers land somewhere around 25–40% opacity in a corner or along an edge — visible enough to identify, unobtrusive enough that the photo still reads as a photo rather than a stamped document. If you're watermarking specifically to prevent unauthorized commercial use rather than casual sharing, that calculus flips and a bolder, harder-to-crop-out placement makes more sense.
One thing watermarking doesn't do
A visible text watermark says nothing about the invisible metadata already embedded in the file — camera model, timestamp, and sometimes GPS coordinates from the original shot. If privacy is part of why you're watermarking a photo before sharing it, it's worth also running it through the EXIF Metadata Viewer & Remover, since that hidden data travels with the file regardless of what you've drawn on top of it.