Add Watermark to Photo
Add a watermark to a photo or video: your name or a © line set large and faint across the middle, or small in a corner, in any font. Free, nothing uploaded.
What is a watermark?
Watermarks started in paper. Papermakers bent wire into a design and fixed it to the mold, so the sheet formed thinner there, and the design shows light when you hold it up to a window. The oldest known example is on paper from 1282. Historians use the marks to tell which mill made a sheet and roughly when.
On a photo, a watermark is a faint line of text or a logo laid over the picture. It shows who made it and makes reusing it without credit a bit less tempting.
What should a photo watermark say?
Most follow the form of a copyright notice: the © symbol, the year and the owner's name, as in © 2026 Your Name. Under US law a notice has been optional since March 1, 1989. Still, when a proper one is on the copy, an infringer can't plead innocent infringement to get the damages reduced.
A text watermark in a corner is easy to crop away. One across the middle, the way stock photo sites mark their previews, is harder to get rid of, though it covers more of the photo.
How to add a watermark to a photo
Load a photo or a video. The watermark starts as © Your Name in large white Georgia with a black outline, centered on the picture at 45% Opacity. Type your own line in Text; it takes up to 120 characters.
For a corner mark, lower Size and move the line with Position X and Position Y. Align says which side of that point the text sits on. Left puts the line to its left, so with Position X near 1 the text ends just inside the right edge. Font sets the typeface, and your own .ttf or .otf file works too. Colour, Outline colour and Outline width handle the look.
Opacity sets how faint the mark is. Blend mode can sink it into the photo with Multiply, Screen, Overlay and others, and Plate puts a box behind the line.
Settings for a client proof, a corner credit and a video
For a proof you're sending a client, keep the line centered and set Size to 0.15, Opacity to 0.3 and Blend mode to Overlay. Overlay lightens the tones under the letters instead of painting flat white over them. The mark reads across most of the photo with the texture showing through, and only fades over near-white areas like sky.
For a credit on a portfolio or social post, try Size 0.035, Position X 0.97, Position Y 0.95, Align Left, Opacity 0.7 and Outline width 1. Since Align is on Left, the line sits to the left of Position X and ends 3% from the right edge however long it is.
On a video, the free page's own small mark sits in the bottom right corner. Put yours at the top right instead: Position Y at 0.06, with the corner credit's other settings.
Why is my watermark hard to read on some photos?
White letters disappear over sky and snow, and dark ones over shadow. The black outline is what keeps the default readable on both, so leave Outline ticked, and raise Outline width to 2 or 3 when you lower Opacity. On a busy picture Plate is the safer bet, though the box covers more of the photo.
If changing the preset wiped your line, that's because a preset puts every setting it doesn't name back to its default, Text included. Pick the preset first, then type.
Saving a watermarked photo
Crop with Crop Image before you add the mark. A corner credit placed on the full frame is the first thing a later crop cuts off. Watermarked photos save well as JPG, and if you need the file smaller, run it through Image Compressor and keep an eye on the readout.
Hang on to the unmarked original, because this page can't take the mark off the copy later. For lettering that's there to be looked at instead of to claim a picture, the Text Effects hub has styled type.