Image watermark — add a logo or text to photos (no upload)

When a watermark earns its place

Once a photo starts circulating beyond where you posted it, something needs to show who took it. That matters most for second-hand listings, hands-on review photos and blog thumbnails — the pictures other sites copy most readily. A watermark will not stop copying, but it makes the source travel with the image, which removes the easiest kind of reuse.

Logo, text, or both

A logo builds recognition; text explains context. You can use either or both. For a logo, use a PNG with a transparent background — an opaque square logo looks like a box laid over the photo and hides the subject. Keep text short. A handle or shop name of two to four words is usually enough for the meaning to survive on its own.

Position and opacity, the practical defaults

Start with a corner the subject leaves empty. Avoid faces in portraits and the centre of a product. Opacity of 60–90% works well: too strong and it ruins the photo, too faint and it disappears. Use dark text on bright photos and bright text on dark ones. A thin dark outline is applied by default so the text stays readable on any background.

Size scales with the photo

Logo and text sizes are percentages of the shorter side of the photo. Pick the same percentage and a 4000px original and a 1200px web image come out looking similar. That keeps the watermark's presence consistent when you batch differently sized photos in one run.

JPG or PNG output

The result is a flat image with no transparency. JPG is the smaller choice for photos; PNG is the better choice for screenshots with text and low-detail images. You can run the result through another tool afterwards — for example the image compressor and resizer — to finish the whole photo workflow in one pass.

Your originals are untouched

Every result is a new file. The original file name and contents stay as they were, so a bad run costs nothing to redo. If a saved file would collide with an existing name in the same folder, the browser appends a number. Multiple results can be downloaded together as a ZIP.

Nothing leaves the browser

Everything runs on a canvas inside your browser. Because no photo is uploaded, freshly shot hands-on images and unreleased product shots are safe to process here. The page even works with the internet disconnected after it loads.

Read next

If file size is a concern after watermarking, finish with the image compressor. And if the photo itself looks wrong, check monitor calibration before blaming the file.