Free watermark generator for creators

What a watermark does and does not do

A watermark will not stop your content being stolen. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What it does is change the economics of stealing it. A tiled mark across an image takes real effort to remove, and the sort of person who reposts content in bulk is, almost by definition, not looking for effort. They will take the unmarked image from the next creator instead.

The second job it does is quieter and matters more later. When your content turns up somewhere it should not be, a watermark carrying your handle is immediate, visible evidence of who made it. That is useful in a takedown, and it is useful in the more common situation where a site claims the content was submitted by its rightful owner.

Choosing a style

The trade-off is always the same: the harder a watermark is to remove, the more it interferes with the picture. Where you land depends on what the image is for.

• •Tiled across the whole image. The strongest option, and the right one for previews, teasers and anything you post publicly to advertise.
• •Diagonal through the middle. Nearly as strong and often better looking, because it is one mark rather than forty.
• •A single centre mark. Good middle ground for PPV previews where you want the image to still sell the content.
• •Corner. Looks the best, protects the least. Roughly four seconds of cropping away from being gone. Fine for content going to paying subscribers, where the point is attribution rather than defence.

A useful habit is to watermark by audience rather than by file: heavy marks on anything public, light marks on anything behind a paywall, because the public versions are the ones doing the advertising and the paid versions are the ones you would rather looked good.

Never use your real name

Your watermark is designed to be seen by strangers, including the ones stealing from you. It should carry your creator handle and nothing else. This sounds obvious and is still one of the more common ways creators accidentally connect their two identities.

Your image stays on your device

This tool draws your photo onto a canvas in your own browser and exports it from there. It never reaches us. That is partly a privacy principle and partly common sense: asking creators to upload unreleased content to a third party in order to protect it would be an odd way to run a protection company.

For the strategy behind all this, including what to do when watermarked content gets stolen anyway, our full guide to watermarking goes further than a tool page sensibly can.