Image Watermark

Text Watermarks and What They Are Actually Worth

A visible watermark is a deterrent and a credit line. It won't protect the image: anyone determined to remove one can clone it out or crop it off in a few minutes. So deciding how much of the picture to give up to a stamp comes down to how much casual reuse you want to discourage.

This tool stamps text, and only text

Type a line (a name, a domain, DRAFT, SPECIMEN) and it's drawn in a bold sans-serif face over the photograph. There's no logo upload and no image overlay. The step-by-step instructions on this page used to offer one, but 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

There are five fixed positions, the centre and the four corners, plus a tiled mode that repeats the text in a grid across the whole frame.

A corner is the polite choice for a photo credit, and also the easiest for someone else to crop away. Tiling is the aggressive option. It survives cropping because there's no clean area left, but it dominates 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 same 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 shows 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 and not as part of the photograph. Pick a colour that won't vanish into the picture. White disappears against a bright sky, and black disappears against a dark suit.

Once it's flattened there is no layer

The text is merged into the pixels when you download. You get a single image, with nothing you can hide, move or re-edit afterwards.

Keep the original file. If you change your mind later about the corner, the size or the opacity, start again from that original. Stamping an already-stamped export leaves both marks visible and puts the photograph through a second lossy encode for no benefit.

Neighbouring jobs

To mark up a document instead of a photograph, Add Watermark works on the PDF itself and not 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 if you watermark first and resize afterwards you'll end up setting the size twice.