How to Add a Watermark to a Photo (Text or Logo)

Watermarks serve two purposes — branding (so reposts visibly carry your name) and theft-deterrence (so a bad actor can't pretend the photo is theirs without obvious editing). The two purposes call for different settings.

Branding watermarks (subtle)

For posts where you want recognition without visual distraction:

1. Open Add Watermark.
2. Drop your photo.
3. Type your name / handle in the text field, or upload a logo PNG.
4. Pick bottom-right corner (the convention).
5. Set opacity to 40-60%.
6. Set size to 3-5% of image width.
7. Click Apply, download.

The watermark is visible on close inspection but doesn't dominate the image. Good for portfolio uploads, social posts, and stock-photo previews.

Theft-deterrent watermarks (aggressive)

For photos you want to make impractical to repost without your branding:

1. Same starting steps.
2. Pick tiled instead of corner placement.
3. Set opacity to 15-25%.
4. Increase the tile density so the watermark repeats every 200-300 px across the image.
5. Set rotation to 30-45 degrees.
6. Apply.

The watermark covers the entire image at low intensity. Cropping it out is impossible (every region of the photo has a watermark instance), and any algorithmic removal leaves visible artifacts.

This is the standard for Shutterstock, Getty Images, and other stock-photo previews.

Logo vs text

Both work; trade-offs:

Approach	Pros	Cons
Text	Lightweight, scales infinitely, easy to update	Less visually distinctive
Logo (PNG with transparency)	Brand-recognizable	Doesn't scale to small sizes well unless source is high-res

For logo watermarks, use a PNG with a transparent background. Remove Background cleans up logos that have white backgrounds.

Batch watermarking

Drop multiple photos at once and the tool applies the same watermark to all of them with one click. Settings persist across the batch — useful when you're publishing a 20-photo gallery and want consistent branding.

After watermarking

• Compress the output if you're going to post it on a platform with file-size limits.
• Strip metadata — watermarks don't help if the EXIF still says the camera location was your home address.

FAQ

Will the watermark survive Instagram's re-encoding? Visually, yes — both text and image watermarks come through IG's compression intact. The compression makes the watermark slightly softer-edged but doesn't remove it.

Can a watermark be removed? Subtle corner watermarks at 40%+ opacity can be cropped out (just trim the affected corner). Tiled watermarks across the whole image are essentially impossible to remove without leaving obvious artifacts. The tile pattern is what you want for serious anti-theft.

What about invisible / steganographic watermarks? These embed information in the image's pixel data without visual change. They're useful for tracking but defeat the branding purpose. For most use cases, visible watermarks are the right tool.