How to add a watermark to a photo

The short answer

Drop one or more photos into the tool below. Under Watermark choose Text and type your name, shop or website, or choose Logo and pick an image file. Click a square in the Position grid, then adjust Text size or Logo size, Opacity, Margin and Angle. The Preview shows your first photo and changes while you drag a slider; when you let go, every photo in the list is processed again with the same settings.

Each finished image can be compared with the original and downloaded on its own, or you can download everything as one ZIP. The marked copies get the original name plus -watermark, so your originals stay untouched and easy to tell apart.

If you need the same watermark again later, use Share with these settings below the tool: the link keeps position, size, opacity, angle, color and your text. A logo file is never put into a link, you pick it again when you come back.

Text or logo: which one to use

A text watermark is the fastest choice and looks clean when it is short: a name, a handle or a domain such as yourshop.com. It is drawn with the fonts of your device, so every language and script works, including accented letters, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese. You can choose Sans, Serif or Monospace, bold or regular, and any color.

A logo watermark makes the mark recognizable at a glance, which suits brands, studios and online shops. The tool accepts PNG, WebP, SVG and JPG files.

• Use a PNG or SVG with a transparent background. A JPG logo brings its white or colored box along and shows as a pale rectangle on the photo.
• If your logo only exists as a JPG, remove the background first with Anyfeat's background remover and save it as PNG.
• Use a logo that is at least a few hundred pixels wide, so it stays sharp on large photos.
• A light logo on light photos disappears. Keep a white version and a dark version and pick the one that contrasts with your pictures.
• Add a © sign in front of your name if you want to make the copyright claim obvious; it is a normal character and can be typed into the text field.

Position, size and opacity that work

Size and margin are measured against the shorter side of each photo. Text size 5 percent means the letters are about one twentieth of the short side high, on a small phone picture and on a large camera file alike. That is why a mixed batch of portrait and landscape photos ends up with marks that look the same.

Opacity sets how visible the mark is: the higher the value, the stronger it shows. Below about 20 percent it fades on busy photos, above about 70 percent it starts to dominate the picture. The Shadow option adds a soft dark outline to light text, or a light one to dark text, so the mark stays readable on both bright sky and dark shadows.

If the text or logo is too large for the chosen corner, it is scaled down automatically so it never sticks out of the picture.

Corner mark or repeated pattern

A small mark in a corner is polite: it signs the picture without getting in the way, which is why photographers and shops use it. Its weakness is that it can be cropped off in seconds, so keep it close enough to the subject that a crop would hurt the photo, for example with a smaller Margin.

Turn on Repeat across the image when protection matters more than looks. The text or logo is repeated in staggered rows over the whole picture. If the Angle was 0, it is set to -30 degrees, the familiar diagonal look; you can change it afterwards. A pattern like this cannot be cropped away and takes real effort to retouch, which makes it the right choice for client proofs, stock previews and copies of documents.

When you send a photo of an ID card, a passport or a contract, write the purpose and date into the text, for example: Only for rental application, 27.10.2026. If the copy ever turns up somewhere else, the mark shows what it was meant for.

What a watermark protects and what it does not

A visible watermark is a label, not a lock. It shows who made or owns a picture and discourages casual copying, but someone determined can still crop, paint over or clone out a mark, and AI tools make that easier every year. Keep this in mind before relying on it.

• It does: credit you when the picture is shared, make reposts without permission obvious, and make copies of documents less useful for anything else.
• It does not: stop anyone from saving, screenshotting or printing the picture.
• Repeated marks are much harder to remove than one in a corner, and lower opacity is easier to remove than higher opacity.
• Keep your unmarked originals. The watermark is drawn into the pixels of the copy, it cannot be switched off later.
• For publishing, a smaller copy of a photo also helps: a 1600 pixel wide picture is fine on screen and far less useful for printing a poster.

Formats, quality and common problems

JPG, PNG and WebP photos keep their format. JPG and WebP are saved again at high quality (92), PNG stays lossless and keeps transparency. HEIC and AVIF photos are saved as JPG, GIF and BMP files as PNG, because browsers cannot write those formats. The orientation your phone stored in the photo is applied first, so the mark lands in the corner you see, not in the corner of the sideways sensor image.

• The tool asks for a logo: in Logo mode, choose a logo file before the photos can be processed.
• The logo has a white box around it: it is a JPG or a PNG without transparency. Use a transparent PNG instead.
• The text is hard to read: turn on Shadow, raise Opacity or choose a color that contrasts with the photo.
• The mark looks smaller on some photos: size follows the short side, so very wide panoramas get a mark that is small relative to their width. Raise the size for those.
• The file got larger: adding a pattern adds detail, especially to PNG files. Run the result through the image compressor if size matters.