Watermark Studio
Put your name on your work before it travels. Stamp a whole batch of photos with a line of text or your logo — quietly in a corner, or tiled across the frame for previews and proofs. Everything happens on your device: nothing is uploaded, ever.
Drop your photos here, or click to choose
JPG, PNG or WebP · batch friendly · nothing is uploaded
Corner watermarks sit 3% in from the edges automatically. For tiled watermarks, a rotation of around −30° looks best. Your originals are never changed — downloads are copies.
Why watermark — and what it honestly can't do
A watermark does three useful things. It signs your work, the way painters have always signed a canvas. It points anyone who finds the image — on a repost, a screenshot, a mood board — back to its maker, which quietly turns other people's sharing into your marketing. And it deters the casual reuse that makes up most image theft: the blog that grabs photos without asking, the seller who lifts a product shot. Faced with a marked image, most people simply move on to an unmarked one.
What it is not is DRM. A determined person with editing skills and time can crop, clone or paint a watermark out, and no tool — this one included — can stop them. Think of a watermark as a lock on a garden gate: it keeps honest people honest and makes dishonesty obvious. Your real protection is keeping your full-resolution originals private and only ever publishing marked, web-sized copies — which is exactly the workflow this studio is built for.
Corner or tiled? Choosing a placement
A corner watermark — bottom right is the classic spot — is the portfolio choice. It is polite, it stays out of the subject's way, and it reads as a signature rather than a security measure. Use it for images on your own site and social feeds, where the audience is yours and the watermark is mostly a credit line. Its weakness is obvious: it can be cropped away in seconds, so treat it as attribution, not armour.
A tiled watermark, repeated across the whole frame at a gentle angle, is for images that leave your control: client proofs before payment, stock previews, competition entries, anything a stranger might be tempted to use as-is. Because it crosses faces, skies and subjects alike, removing it means rebuilding the photograph — which is precisely the point. Keep the opacity low so clients can still judge the photo itself; you are marking the copy, not ruining it.
The art of subtle: opacity, size and taste
The most common watermarking mistake is shouting. If the mark is the first thing a viewer notices, it has failed — the photo should still win. Start around 40–60% opacity for a corner signature and 25–40% for tiles, sized at roughly 4–6% of the image width for text. White suits most photographs; switch to black on bright, high-key images, or pick a tone sampled from the scene. A small, quiet, consistent mark in the same place on every image looks professional; a huge diagonal logo looks like you don't trust your own audience. And whatever style you settle on, the mark only helps if the photo underneath earns attention — sharp, well-made originals are still the whole game.
A practical order of work: edit first (any of the free editing apps we recommend will do), export web-sized copies, watermark the copies here, then run them through the Image Compressor if they still need slimming for your site. Masters stay unmarked in your archive; only the travelling copies carry your name.
Frequently asked questions
Are my photos uploaded to a server?
No. The watermarking runs entirely in your browser using its built-in image engine — the same trick as our other tools. Load this page, switch your device to airplane mode, and it still works. Your photos, and your logo, never leave your device.
Can a watermark be removed?
Honestly: sometimes. A corner mark can be cropped off, and a skilled editor can retouch out even a tiled one given enough time. What a watermark changes is the effort and the intent — casual reuse stops, and anyone who does remove one has clearly acted deliberately, which matters if a dispute ever reaches a platform or a lawyer. Watermark the copies, keep the originals private, and you have done what is reasonably possible.
Does watermarking change my original file?
No. Your originals are never modified, renamed or re-saved. Every download is a fresh copy with -watermarked added to its name, rendered at the moment you click — change your mind about the opacity and you can simply download again.
What happens to my photos' EXIF data?
Watermarked copies are re-encoded through the browser, which strips most embedded metadata — including GPS coordinates — in the process. That is usually a privacy bonus, but it cuts both ways: if you rely on EXIF copyright fields as part of your proof of authorship, keep an untouched master archived. To see exactly what a photo carries before you share it, run it through our EXIF Viewer first.
Text or logo — which looks better?
Text is faster and scales cleanly to any size, and a tasteful serif in a corner suits most photographers. A logo looks more established if you already have one — use a PNG with a transparent background, ideally a white or black single-colour version, so it sits naturally over any photograph. Either way, consistency is what makes it read as a brand rather than a warning label.