Add a watermark to an image
Text or a logo, anywhere on the frame. Neither your photo nor your logo is uploaded.
JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF and BMP. Your file is processed on your device.
How do I add a watermark to an image?
Text, or your own logo
Text is the fast option: type a name, a site address or the word “proof”, pick a corner, and you are finished. A logo image is the one to use if you have a brand mark — a PNG with a transparent background sits on the photograph properly, where a JPEG logo arrives with a white box around it.
Both are drawn at a size proportional to the image rather than at a fixed number of pixels, so a setting that looks right on the preview looks right on the file, whether that file is 800 pixels wide or 8,000.
A logo is usually a PNG with transparency; if yours is a JPEG with a white box around it, converting it will not create transparency that was never there — that is an editing job. What it will do is stop the box getting worse each time the file is re-saved.
Where to put it
A corner is polite and easy to crop off. The centre is intrusive and hard to remove. Tiling covers the frame diagonally and is close to impossible to remove cleanly, which is why proof copies and preview galleries use it and why nobody uses it on a finished photograph.
The honest summary is that visibility and removability are the same axis. Anything unobtrusive enough to leave a photograph looking good is also unobtrusive enough to be cropped, cloned or painted out. Decide which of those two things you are optimising for before you start moving the opacity slider, because you cannot have both.
Opacity is not a compromise between the two
Turning a watermark down to twenty per cent does not make it half as removable and half as ugly. A faint mark over a busy area of a photograph is often easier to remove than a solid one, because there is more surrounding detail to reconstruct from. Where opacity genuinely helps is legibility: forty to sixty per cent with an outline reads clearly on almost any background without dominating the picture, and that is the range worth starting in.
Before publishing anything, it is worth reading what a watermark actually protects — it is a deterrent and an attribution rather than a lock, and knowing which of those you need decides every setting above.
Do the size limit at the same time
Under output options there is a maximum file size. Use it rather than watermarking first and compressing afterwards, because two saves of a JPEG discard information twice. FileBelow draws the mark and then searches for the best-quality encode that fits your limit, in one pass — and it does it in that order deliberately, so the finished file genuinely is under the limit you asked for rather than over it by the size of the watermark.
Common questions
- Is my logo uploaded anywhere?
- No — and neither is the photograph. Both files are opened in your browser and the watermark is drawn on your own device. A logo is often the single most sensitive file a small business hands to a free website, and the reason this tool can be used without thinking about that is that there is no server here to send it to.
- Does a watermark stop people stealing my photos?
- It makes casual reuse obvious and inconvenient. It does not make theft impossible: a corner mark can be cropped off, and a determined person with editing software can remove most watermarks given enough time. A large, tiled, semi-transparent mark across the middle is genuinely hard to remove cleanly — and equally hard to look at. Choosing between those is the real decision, and it depends on whether you are deterring casual copying or protecting a paid image.
- Why is the size set as a percentage rather than in pixels?
- Because a watermark in pixels is the wrong size on almost every image. Twenty-four pixels of text is illegible on a 6000-pixel photograph and covers a third of a 300-pixel thumbnail — and you are setting it while looking at a preview that is neither of those sizes. A percentage of the short edge means the mark occupies the same proportion of the frame whatever the resolution, which is what you were actually judging by eye.
- What does the outline option do?
- It draws a contrasting halo behind the letters. Without it, white text vanishes against a bright sky and black text vanishes in shadow, and since a photograph usually contains both, a watermark placed by eye on one image can be invisible on the next. The outline is what makes a single setting readable across a whole set of photos.
- Can I watermark a whole folder at once?
- Not yet. This tool takes one photograph at a time. The processing engine underneath already accepts batches — that part was built in from the start — but the interface for choosing, previewing and reviewing many files at once has not been, and shipping a half-built version of it would be worse than saying so.