Watermark Maker
Add a text or logo watermark to your photos in your browser. Adjust opacity, position, rotation, and tile pattern.
Watermark Maker
Then tweak the watermark on the left — the preview updates live.
How to add a watermark
Choose your image
Click Choose image and pick a JPG, PNG, or WebP. The preview shows on the right immediately. The file stays on your device — nothing is uploaded.
Pick text or logo
For a text watermark, type your name or copyright string and pick a font, size, and color. For a logo watermark, switch the mode toggle and choose a PNG (transparency works best). The preview updates live with every setting change.
Position and style it
Pick one of nine positions, or toggle Tile to repeat the watermark across the entire image (best protection against simple crops). Adjust the opacity and rotation until the mark is visible without drowning the picture; a diagonal tile is the usual pattern for proof images.
Download
Click Download watermarked image. It saves at the original resolution: as PNG when the source was a PNG, GIF, WebP or AVIF, so any transparency survives, and otherwise as JPEG at quality 92. The line under the preview says which. For another format, run the file through our Image Format Converter.
Watermarks — useful, imperfect, often misunderstood
A visible watermark does three jobs: it tells everyone who sees an image who made it, it asserts ownership, and it makes casual reuse less attractive. It does none of them perfectly. A corner mark is cropped out in seconds; a tile across the whole picture is harder to remove but spoils the image for everyone, including you. Which trade-off is right depends on which job matters most.
Attribution-first watermarks
If the point is that your name travels with the picture, a small, unobtrusive mark in a corner does it with the least damage to the photograph. Its weakness is obvious — anyone can crop it off — so it is attribution, not protection. Because this tool redraws the image on a canvas, the saved file carries no EXIF data (camera, lens, GPS position, date), which is usually what you want for a picture you are about to post.
Theft-deterrence watermarks
If the point is to make a preview useless without paying, a large tile across the whole image is the standard answer; stock photo sites use it on their previews. The trade-off is real: nobody wants that version of the picture, so it is for proofs, previews and contest entries, with the clean file kept back.
A watermark that is exactly the same on every image is the easiest kind to remove — because every image teaches the software where it is.
What research says about removing them
In 2017 four Google Research scientists showed at the CVPR conference that visible watermarks "as employed by photographers and stock content marketplaces can be removed automatically". Removing one from a single image is hard; but a watermark added the same way to many images lets software work out the watermark and its transparency, and subtract it from all of them. They tested the obvious defences. Randomly moving the watermark, or varying its opacity or colour, did not stop the attack. A small geometric distortion of the watermark in each image did — it "significantly" degraded the removed images while changing the watermark imperceptibly. This tool applies your settings identically each time, so if you mark a whole portfolio with one setting, you have made the consistent collection that paper attacks. Changing the position between images is not enough; it is the watermark's own shape that has to vary.
What watermarks don't do
They don't create copyright: in most countries you own it from the moment you make the work. They don't stop screenshots or downloads. Under US law they do two specific things worth knowing. First, registering the work matters more than marking it: 17 U.S.C. §412 bars statutory damages and attorney's fees for infringement that began before registration, unless the work is registered within three months of first publication. Second, removing a watermark can itself be unlawful: 17 U.S.C. §1202 forbids intentionally removing "copyright management information", which it defines to include the author's name and the owner's copyright notice.
Practical choices
Pick a colour that contrasts with most of the picture; the tool adds a soft shadow so white text still shows on light areas. Put the mark across something that matters — a mark over empty sky is cropped away with the sky. Keep an unmarked original, because you will want one. And for anything you care about, don't rely on the visible mark alone.
Consistent watermarks, signed provenance, and what US copyright law says about removal
Google Research's 2017 CVPR paper "On the Effectiveness of Visible Watermarks" removed stock-photo watermarks automatically by learning them from many images that shared the same mark.
In the same study, randomising a watermark's position, opacity or colour did not stop the automatic removal. Slightly deforming the watermark in each image did.
The attack needs a collection. Removing a well-made watermark from one image, without knowing what the watermark looks like, the authors describe as an extremely difficult task.
Under US law, statutory damages and attorney's fees are not available for infringement that began before a work was registered, unless registration follows within three months of first publication (17 U.S.C. §412).
US law also forbids intentionally removing "copyright management information" — which includes the author's name and the copyright notice — without the owner's authority (17 U.S.C. §1202).
Google DeepMind's SynthID embeds invisible watermarks in AI-generated images, audio, text and video from Google's generative products; they are imperceptible to people but detectable by SynthID's own tools.
The C2PA, a project of the Joint Development Foundation, writes open standards for content provenance — cryptographically signed records of how a file was made, rather than a mark in the pixels.
The researchers demonstrated the removal on watermarked image collections taken from top stock photography websites, and argued that visible watermarks should be designed to resist mass removal, not only removal from one image.
This tool redraws the image on a canvas, so the saved file has no EXIF metadata — no camera model, date or GPS position — whether or not the original did.
A watermark on a transparent PNG needs a format that keeps transparency. JPEG has no alpha channel, which is why the tool saves a PNG source as PNG.
FAQ
-
No. The image, logo, and final watermarked file all stay in your browser. Watermarking happens on a Canvas element on your device. Verify it yourself by opening DevTools → Network and watching for outbound traffic — there is none when you apply the watermark or download.
-
There is no standard figure. Low enough that the picture still reads, high enough that the mark is obvious at the size people will see it. Check at the size the image will actually be shown, not zoomed in. For deterrence, coverage matters more than opacity: a faint tile over the whole image is harder to deal with than a solid mark in a corner.
-
Text is faster and works without prep. A logo (especially PNG with alpha) looks more professional if you have one. Many photographers do both: small logo bottom-corner + text copyright string. Use whichever matches your brand.
-
It does not create copyright — you normally own it the moment you make the work — but it identifies you, and in the US removing it deliberately can breach 17 U.S.C. §1202, which protects the author's name and copyright notice as "copyright management information". For the strongest US remedies, register the work: under §412, statutory damages and attorney's fees require registration before the infringement, or within three months of first publication.
-
Yes. A corner mark can be cropped; a tile can be painted out by hand or by AI inpainting. Research from Google in 2017 showed that a watermark applied identically to many images can be removed from all of them automatically, and that randomly moving it or changing its opacity did not help — slightly deforming it in each image did. A watermark raises the cost of reuse; it does not prevent it.
-
PNG if the source was a PNG, GIF, WebP or AVIF, so transparency is kept; JPEG at quality 92 for anything else. Before 30 September 2026 it always saved JPEG, which filled transparent areas with black. Use our Image Format Converter for other formats.
-
The tool adds a subtle drop shadow to text watermarks, but on a bright background it can still vanish. Switch the colour to off-white or 90% grey, or try a darker accent like #cccccc — these contrast against both light and dark backgrounds.
-
No — this tool marks one image at a time. If you do mark a set, vary more than the position between images: research from Google found that one watermark applied identically across a collection can be learned and stripped from all of them, while a slight change in the watermark's own shape per image resisted that.
-
Yes, in current Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android. Very large photos can exceed what a phone's browser can encode; the tool now tells you when that happens instead of failing silently — resize the photo first. Use the Choose image button; drag-and-drop is desktop-only.
-
No — canvas re-encoding strips EXIF (camera, lens, GPS, date) from the output. This is usually a feature, not a bug, for privacy. If you want to view or selectively strip EXIF without watermarking, use our EXIF Viewer.
Method & sources
How it computes
Draws the image on a canvas, then the text or logo at the chosen opacity, rotation and position, or tiled across a rotated grid. PNG, GIF, WebP and AVIF sources save as PNG so transparency survives; others as JPEG at quality 92. Canvas redraw drops EXIF metadata. A canvas too large for the browser to encode is reported.
What this tool implements
- Until this review every download was JPEG, so transparent areas of a PNG came back black; a null encode threw, and the "choose an image" box stayed under the preview.
- Dekel, Rubinstein, Liu and Freeman (CVPR 2017): a watermark applied consistently across a collection can be removed automatically; random position, opacity or colour did not stop it, per-image geometric deformation did. The page's claim that tiles make thieves "give up" is replaced by this.
- 17 U.S.C. §412 (statutory damages need registration) and §1202 (removing copyright management information). Invented facts removed: a 67% YouTube figure, "shochiku", WeChat and Getty claims.
Sources
- Dekel T, Rubinstein M, Liu C, Freeman WT. On the Effectiveness of Visible Watermarks. CVPR 2017. https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/papers/Dekel_On_t…
- Legal Information Institute. 17 U.S. Code § 412 — Registration as prerequisite to certain remedies for infringement. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/412
- Legal Information Institute. 17 U.S. Code § 1202 — Integrity of copyright management information. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202
- Google DeepMind. SynthID. https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
- Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. About C2PA. https://c2pa.org/about/
Pick up where you left off
Stored only in this browser — never sent to our servers.