A watermark is how a photograph carries its owner's name into the world: the photographer's credit in the corner of a wedding preview, the studio name across a listing photo, SAMPLE over an image that has not been paid for yet. Choose a picture, type the words, place them in any of nine positions, set how strongly they should show, and download the stamped copy at the photo's full resolution — all on your device, with your original never touched and never uploaded.
Nine positions, one honest grid
The position menu is the photograph divided into a three-by-three grid: top, middle or bottom, crossed with left, centre or right. Bottom right — the default — is where credits have lived since the darkroom era: visible, polite, out of the subject's way. Centre is the opposite statement, a claim stamped across the middle of the image, right for previews and proofs that are meant to be looked at but not used. Corners keep faces and horizons clear; the middle row suits wide landscape images where the top and bottom carry sky and foreground you would rather not write on. The text is set in a bold sans face with a soft shadow, so it stays readable over both bright skies and dark corners — the two places plain text usually disappears.
Opacity and size: the photographer's dial
Opacity runs from 10% to 100% and decides what the watermark is. At the low end it is a signature — a whisper of ownership that a client barely notices on a finished image. Around the 50% default it is a clear label. At full strength it is a barrier, the setting for unpaid proofs. Size is expressed as a percentage of the image's width, so the same setting looks the same on a phone photo and a 45-megapixel original: 4% is a discreet credit line, 8–10% dominates a corner, and anything above that is a banner. Because the output is drawn at the image's own full resolution and saved as a lossless PNG, the stamped copy is exactly as sharp as the original — convert it afterwards with the Image Converter if you need a smaller JPG for the web.
What a watermark does — and does not do
Be clear-eyed: a watermark is baked into the pixels of the copy you download, and determined removal tools and cropping exist. What a watermark genuinely does is mark ownership unmistakably, deter casual reuse, and make the source of a wandering image obvious wherever it lands — which covers the overwhelming majority of real-world misuse, most of which is lazy rather than criminal. It is not encryption and it is not a lock; pair it with sensible originals-keeping (never publish your only full-resolution copy) and it does its job well.
Worked example
Use the sample photo, leave the text as “My Photo”, the position on bottom right, opacity at 50% and size at 4%, and press Add watermark: the preview and the download show the words in white at the photo's lower-right corner, half-transparent with a soft shadow, at the full 1200 × 800. Move the position to Centre and raise the opacity to 90% to see the same photo become an unmistakable proof.
How to use this tool
- Drop your image onto the box (or use the sample photo).
- Type the watermark text — your name, your studio, © and a year, or SAMPLE for proofs.
- Choose one of the nine positions; bottom right is the classic credit spot, centre is the proof stamp.
- Set the opacity: low for a signature, around 50% for a label, high for a barrier.
- Set the size as a percentage of the image width, press Add watermark, and download the PNG.
Stamping a whole set consistently
Because size here is relative — a percentage of each image's width — a set of photos of different sizes comes out with visually identical watermarks when you use the same settings on each, which is exactly what a portfolio or a listing set wants. Run the images through one at a time with the text, position, opacity and size unchanged, and keep the unwatermarked originals in a separate folder: the stamped copies are for publishing, the originals are the asset. If a platform recompresses uploads heavily, raise the opacity a notch — compression eats faint detail first, and watermarks are faint detail by design.