Add Watermark to Image Online

Add a text watermark to your images

A watermark marks an image as yours, discourages unauthorised reuse, and keeps your name or handle attached as a photo spreads online. This tool stamps customisable text onto any image with a live preview — and renders the whole thing in your browser, so the photo never gets uploaded.

How the watermark is rendered

Your image is drawn to a canvas at full resolution, then the text is painted on top with the size, colour, opacity, and position you set. A subtle drop shadow keeps light text legible over bright areas. Every adjustment re-renders a debounced live preview, so what you see is exactly what downloads.

The placement tradeoff

Every position trades visibility against intrusiveness, and the right point on that scale depends entirely on why you are marking the image.

• A single corner is the lightest touch: it labels ownership while leaving the photograph itself unobstructed, which is what you want for a portfolio or a finished post you are happy for people to enjoy. Bottom-right is conventional because Western eyes finish a scan there, but it is also the easiest mark to crop off — a 5% trim of each edge erases it entirely.
• Centre is the opposite bargain: impossible to ignore, impossible to crop without destroying the image, but it sits squarely over the subject. Reserve it for proofs, samples, and comps you specifically do not want used as-is.
• Tiled diagonal splits the difference at scale. Repeating the mark across the whole frame means there is no clean region to crop to and no single instance to clone out, so removal becomes genuinely tedious rather than a ten-second job. The cost is visual noise, so it pairs best with low opacity.

Opacity: the number that decides everything

Opacity is where most watermarks go wrong in one direction or the other. Think of it as a dial between two failure modes: too faint and a copier simply paints over the few visible pixels; too strong and you have ruined your own image to spite a hypothetical thief.

• 15–30% — branding that whispers; appropriate when the goal is attribution, not deterrence, and ideal for the tiled pattern where the mark appears many times.
• 30–50% — the everyday range for a corner mark on work you publish: clearly present, not distracting.
• 60–90% — assertive, for proofs and previews where you would rather the image be unusable than be lifted.

Two settings amplify opacity. Font size here is a percentage of image width, so the same value looks proportional on a thumbnail and a print-resolution master — a larger mark at the same opacity is harder to remove because it covers more underlying detail. And the built-in drop shadow keeps light text legible over bright areas, which means you can run a lower opacity than you otherwise could and still have the mark read. As a rule of thumb, a bright photo wants dark text and a dark photo wants light text; the shadow rescues the in-between cases.

What watermarks can and can't do

Be honest about the threat model. A visible watermark is a speed bump, not a vault: it makes ownership obvious and stops the casual right-click-and-repost, but a determined editor with a clone-stamp tool can lift a corner mark from a flat background in minutes. Tiling plus moderate opacity multiplies that effort enough to deter all but the most motivated; truly airtight protection means invisible watermarking or DRM, neither of which a free client-side tool can provide. Match the effort to the stakes — a free wallpaper needs less than a paid stock photo.

Watermarked privately in your browser

The base image and the text layer are flattened together on a canvas in this very tab, so you can stamp a not-yet-public shoot or a paying client's deliverable without the unmarked file ever leaving your control.

Related image tools

• Image Cropper — settle the framing before you commit a mark to it.
• Image Converter — turn the exported JPG into PNG or WebP if a platform asks.
• Image Resizer — match the image to its destination so the mark scales right.
• Image Compressor — slim the finished, stamped file for fast loading.