Add Watermark to Image Online — Free & 100% Private

An image watermark is a visible mark — usually text, a logo, or a scannable code — placed on top of a photo to claim ownership, prevent reuse, or label its status. Watermarks have been used since the 13th century on paper; today they protect roughly 3 in 4 commercial photos shared online.

A watermark does two jobs at once. It announces who owns the image (a copyright line, a studio name, a portfolio URL) and it makes the photo harder to use without permission — visible text across the middle of an image is difficult to crop out cleanly, and software that automatically scrapes photos for AI training often skips watermarked sources.

This page gives you a free, browser-based watermark tool that supports three modes — text, logo, and QR code — across unlimited batches. Everything runs locally; your photos are never uploaded.

If you post photos publicly, somebody else can reuse them. Reverse-image-search studies estimate that between 60% and 85% of photos shared on social media are reused at least once by a third party, usually without credit (Pixsy stolen image reports). Photographers in a 2024 ASMP survey reported finding their work used commercially without permission an average of four times per year.

Watermarks don't make theft impossible, but they raise the cost. A clean unwatermarked photo can be reposted in two clicks. A watermarked photo either has to be cropped, edited, or — increasingly — abandoned in favor of someone else's work.

There's a second reason people watermark: status labeling. Real-estate listings stamp "For Sale," newsrooms stamp "Embargoed," design teams stamp "Draft" or "Confidential." The watermark is communication, not protection.

This tool covers both jobs.

Picking a font, color, opacity, and position from scratch takes time. Most people want a watermark that looks like a watermark — not a design exercise. We built 15 ready-to-use templates so you can start with something that already works and tweak from there.

Each template is fully editable after you apply it. The presets are simply fast starting points built around three principles: one-word recognisability, neutral contrast that survives on any photo, and a typeface that reads as official rather than decorative.

The full template list: © Copyright, Confidential, Draft, Sample, Photo by, Real Estate Listing, Property of, Do Not Share, Internal Use, Press Embargo, Beta, Work in Progress, Approval Required, Made by, and Watermark Test.

Use Copyright and Photo by for personal branding; Confidential, Draft, and Do Not Share for legal or internal documents; Real Estate Listing and Property of for commercial work; Press Embargo and Approval Required for newsroom and design-review workflows. Watermark Test is a non-content pattern you can use to dial in placement before applying a real watermark.

If you take photos for clients, list properties, or run an online shop, you're not watermarking one image — you're watermarking fifty. The tool is built for that. Drop a folder, choose your settings on one image, click Apply Settings to All, and every photo in the batch gets the same watermark.

Mixed orientations are handled automatically. Portrait, landscape, and square photos all get the same relative placement — a watermark anchored to the bottom-right corner stays in the bottom-right regardless of aspect ratio, scaled proportionally to image dimensions.

Output filenames are templated. Use {filename}, {date}, {index}, or {originalsize} as tokens — for example, {filename}-watermarked-{date} produces vacation01-watermarked-2026-05-24.jpg. The whole batch is packaged into a single ZIP archive for download.

Most online watermark tools cap free batches — iLoveIMG processes one image per free session, Watermarkly tops out at 100 per batch, BeFunky locks batch behind a paid plan. This tool has no per-batch limit and no daily quota; the only real cap is your device's RAM.

The 9-position grid gives you every standard watermark placement in one control. Each spot has a job:

Bottom-right is the universal copyright corner — viewers don't expect to read there, so the watermark is visible without dominating. Best for personal photos and portfolio work.

Bottom-center works for wider brand names or longer photo credits that don't fit a corner. Common in real-estate listings.

Bottom-left is the photographer-credit corner used by newsrooms and magazines.

Top-right and top-left are for status stamps — "Draft," "Embargo," "Beta." Eyes find the top of the image first, so warnings belong there.

Top-center is for headlines or banners that stretch across the width.

Center is the most aggressive position — used for sample proofs, "Do Not Share" warnings, and any case where the watermark needs to be impossible to ignore or crop.

Middle-left and middle-right are rarely the right choice — they collide with most image subjects. Use them only when a particular photo's composition leaves those edges empty.

If you can't decide: bottom-right at 30% opacity in white is the safest default for almost any photo.

Yes, some watermarks can be removed — and the technology to remove them has improved sharply in the past two years. A simple corner copyright line on a photo with uniform background can be cleaned by AI inpainting tools (Adobe's Generative Fill, Samsung's Object Eraser, free web tools like Cleanup.pictures) in 2–3 seconds.

What survives:

Tiled or diagonal watermarks across the full image are dramatically harder to remove. Each tile sits on different image content, so inpainting has to be re-run for each tile and the results don't blend cleanly.

High-contrast watermarks over busy photo content survive better than soft watermarks over smooth gradients.

Semi-transparent logos that overlap the subject (a face, a product) force the remover to reconstruct the subject, which usually leaves visible artifacts.

For maximum protection, layer a visible watermark with embedded copyright metadata in EXIF (XMP-dc:rights). The visible mark deters casual reuse; the metadata stays even after screenshots are cropped or recompressed. You can manage EXIF metadata with our companion tool.

The honest takeaway: a watermark is a deterrent, not an unbreakable lock. It raises the cost of theft enough that most people won't bother.

A watermarked image is rarely the final step. The most common follow-ups:

Compress for the web. A 4032×3024 photo from your phone is 3–6 MB straight out of the camera. Most blogs and social platforms want it under 500 KB. Use our JPEG compressor or pick a target size directly with compress to 500 KB.

Resize for social media. Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest each have their own aspect ratios. Our resize tool includes one-click presets for each platform.

Convert to WebP. WebP gives 25–35% smaller files than JPEG at equivalent quality. Convert JPG to WebP after watermarking for the fastest possible web loading.

Strip GPS and EXIF. A watermarked photo still carries the GPS coordinates of where it was taken. If you're sharing publicly, remove EXIF metadata as a final step.

Blur faces or sensitive info. If the photo includes people, license plates, or other private details, use our blur tool before adding the watermark.