Image Watermark

Text Watermarks and What They Are Actually Worth

A visible watermark is a deterrent and a credit line. It is not protection: anyone determined to remove one can clone it out or crop it off in a few minutes. Deciding how much of the picture to surrender to a stamp is therefore a judgement about how much casual reuse you want to discourage, not a security decision.

This tool stamps text, and only text

Type a line — a name, a domain, DRAFT, SPECIMEN — and it is drawn in a bold sans-serif face over the photograph. There is no logo upload and no image overlay. The step-by-step instructions on this page previously offered one, and that feature was never built. If you need a graphic mark, composite it in an image editor, or export a wordmark as text from your design tool and stamp those characters instead.

Where the stamp lands

Five fixed positions — the centre and the four corners — plus a tiled mode that repeats the text in a grid across the whole frame.

Corner placement is the polite choice for a photo credit, and also the easiest for someone else to crop away. Tiling is the aggressive choice: it survives cropping because no clean area is left, at the cost of dominating the image. For contract drafts, mock-ups and client proofs, a tiled stamp at low opacity is usually the right trade.

The size number means what it says

Text size is measured in pixels of the exported image, and the preview scales that figure by exactly the factor it scales the picture. A 48 px stamp across a 6,000 px wide photo is a barely visible smudge, so the hint under the slider does the arithmetic and reports the size as a percentage of image width. Rotation covers the full circle; the familiar diagonal look sits near minus 30 degrees.

Opacity between 25 and 50 percent generally reads as a watermark rather than as part of the photograph. Choose a colour that will not vanish into the picture — white disappears against a bright sky, and black disappears against a dark suit.

Once it is flattened there is no layer

The text is merged into the pixels at download time. What you get is a single image with nothing to hide, move or re-edit afterwards.

Keep the original file. Every later change of mind — a different corner, a larger size, a lighter opacity — should start from that original, because stamping an already-stamped export leaves both marks visible and pushes the photograph through a second lossy encode for no benefit.

Neighbouring jobs

To mark up a document rather than a photograph, Add Watermark works on the PDF itself instead of on a bitmap of it.

If the stamped image is heading for a web page, shrink it to its display size with Resize Image before you stamp it. The text is drawn relative to the pixel dimensions of whatever you load, so watermarking first and resizing afterwards means setting the size twice.