Image Watermark

About Image Watermark

This tool places a single text or logo watermark on a photo and saves the result as JPEG, PNG or WebP (by default the same format as the original). You position it with a 3×3 grid of presets (inset 8% from the edges) or by dragging, and the size is a percentage of the image's short side (2–100%, default 14%). That means the same settings look proportionally the same on a 4000×3000 photo and on a 1080×1350 one.

Opacity defaults to 70% and rotation runs from -180° to 180°, with a gentle snap near 0°, 45° and 90°. While you drag, the tool keeps the rotated watermark's bounding box inside the canvas.

Corner watermarks are the easiest to remove

A small signature in the bottom-right corner does not spoil the picture, but anyone can crop it off in one step. If it sits on plain sky or a wall, the object-eraser built into most phones will fill it in without a trace. A corner mark is fine for saying who took the photo; it does little to stop reuse.

To make removal harder, the watermark has to cross busy parts of the subject: hair, foliage, fabric, the edge of a face or product. Inpainting tools fill the hole by borrowing nearby texture, and the more complex that texture is, the more obvious the patch. The trade-off is that the mark also gets in the way of enjoying the image, which is why many photographers post a marked preview and sell or deliver an unmarked original.

Why identical watermarks on many photos are a weakness

In a 2017 CVPR paper, Google researchers (Dekel et al.) showed that when the same watermark is applied at the same position, size and opacity across a collection of images, the collection itself can be used to estimate the watermark's shape and transparency and then remove it automatically. The consistency that stock-photo sites relied on was exactly what made the attack work.

The countermeasure the paper suggests is to vary the watermark slightly from image to image. If you mark a batch with this tool, nudge the position a little, or change the size or angle by a step or two for each photo. For a single shared image, this particular attack does not apply.

Generative inpainting has since made even one-off watermarks fairly easy to erase, especially thin, faint text. It is more accurate to think of a visible watermark as attribution and evidence than as a lock.

What removing a watermark means legally

In the United States, 17 U.S.C. §1202 protects copyright management information (CMI), which includes the author's name and terms of use conveyed with a work. Intentionally removing or altering CMI, or distributing a work knowing that CMI was removed, is prohibited when the person knows or has reason to know it will enable or conceal infringement. South Korea's Copyright Act has a parallel rule in Article 104-3, and many other countries implement the same WIPO treaty obligations.

In practice a watermark makes it harder for someone to claim they did not know who owned the image, and stripping it can create liability separate from the unauthorized use itself. The absence of a watermark does not remove copyright, which arises automatically when the photo is taken. For an actual dispute, talk to a lawyer in your jurisdiction.

Settings that stay readable without taking over

Plain white text disappears on bright backgrounds. Pick a color that contrasts with the area underneath and try an opacity between 40% and 70%. At the default 14%, a 4000×3000 photo gets text roughly 420 px tall; a single line with your name is usually legible at 5–8%.

Use a PNG logo with a transparent background. A JPEG logo carries its white rectangle with it. The output format follows the original, so a JPEG photo is saved as JPEG, and a quality slider (92% by default) controls the size. Switch to PNG and a photo can come out several times larger; save a transparent PNG as JPEG and the transparent areas are filled with white.

Worked examples

How to use it

1. Load the photo and choose text or a logo image.
2. Pick a preset or drag to position, then set size, opacity and rotation.
3. Pick the output format (JPEG, PNG or WebP) and quality, then download.

Frequently asked questions