Add Watermark

💧 Free Online Image Watermark Tool

CleanCutBG's watermark tool adds a visible text watermark to your photos to protect your copyright, brand your work, or discourage reuse without permission. Drag the text anywhere on the image with a live preview, then batch-apply the same watermark to up to 5 photos at once with a single click.

Adjust font size, opacity, colour, and style (bold, italic, underline) with live preview. Compatible with JPG, PNG, WebP, and HEIC files up to 20 MB. The tool adds only your watermark — we never stamp our own branding on your images. No account required, process up to 5 photos per batch.

✅ Why add a watermark to your photos?

• Protect your original photos from unauthorized use, screenshots, or reuploads to other sites
• Brand product photos, blog images, or portfolio pieces with your name or website URL
• Add "© 2026 YourName" copyright notices before publishing to social media, stock sites, or client galleries
• Mark preview or draft images sent to clients so full-resolution unwatermarked versions stay behind payment
• Watermark event photos (weddings, corporate events) before delivering low-resolution proofs
• Batch-brand a whole gallery of photos with identical placement, size, and style
• Add tasteful signatures to photography and design work in the corner or across the centre

📋 How to Add a Watermark

• Import up to 5 photos (20 MB each): drag-and-drop files from a folder, click the upload zone to browse, or paste an image with Ctrl+V
• Type your Watermark Text, your name, brand, © notice, or website URL
• Set the Font Size and Opacity sliders, opacity around 30–50% is usually right
• Toggle Bold, Italic, or Underline as needed
• Pick a Text Colour, white or black for maximum contrast, or a custom colour to match your branding
• Drag the text on the preview to position it exactly where you want on every image
• Set the output format — PNG if you need a lossless file with alpha, JPG for the smallest footprint, or WebP for modern compression with transparency
• Hit Add Watermark — your watermark text is composited onto each uploaded image and the results are returned together

📍 Where Should the Watermark Go?

Placement is a real trade-off. Corner watermarks are easy to ignore but also easy to crop out. Centre watermarks are harder to remove but interfere with the image. Here's how professional photographers approach the decision:

• Bottom-right corner: The photography industry standard. Discreet, visible, easy for viewers to ignore. Downside: anyone can crop the corner off in seconds.
• Bottom-centre, small: A subtle signature that spans the width. Harder to crop without noticeably squeezing the composition.
• Diagonal across the centre, low opacity (15–25%): Maximum copyright protection. Impossible to remove without destroying the image. Standard for stock-photo previews and client proofs.
• Repeated tile pattern: Ultimate protection, the watermark appears every few hundred pixels across the whole photo. Ugly to look at but essentially unrecoverable.
• Along an edge with the URL: If your goal is marketing rather than legal protection, put your website URL along the bottom in a colour that stands out but doesn't fight the image.

🎨 Watermark Design Best Practices

• Keep opacity between 30% and 60%. Too high and it fights the image; too low and it can be Photoshopped out.
• Use a colour with strong contrast against the image. White on dark photos, black on light photos. Custom colour picker for brand consistency.
• Font size 3–5% of the shortest dimension. A 1000px-wide photo needs roughly 30–50px text. Anything larger dominates the image.
• Bold + underline together is usually too much. Pick one or the other for a clean look.
• Include your handle or URL, not just a name. "© Jane Doe" is less useful than "@janedoe.photo", the latter drives traffic back to you.
• Don't watermark family photos. Only watermark work you're publishing publicly or delivering to clients.
• Watermark last. After crop, enhance, compress, then watermark. Otherwise your edits distort the watermark itself.

⚖️ A Note on Copyright

A visible watermark is not what actually creates copyright, you own the copyright the moment you create an original photo. But a watermark makes ownership obvious to viewers, deters casual reuse, and is often required by stock-photo agencies for preview images.

Only add watermarks to images you own or have explicit permission to modify. Watermarking someone else's work with your own name is copyright fraud in most jurisdictions.

❓ Watermarking — Things People Ask

Can I add a logo image as a watermark?
Currently only text watermarks are supported. Image/logo watermarks are on the roadmap. For now, you can render your logo as a stylized text string with a bold or italic font.

Will the watermark stay in the same position on every image?
Yes. Drag the text once on the preview, and every image in the batch will get the same watermark at the same relative coordinates.

Can I remove the watermark later?
No, once baked into the image, the watermark can't be undone. Always keep an untouched original.

What opacity should I use?
30–50% is the sweet spot for most photos. Higher for maximum protection, lower for a subtle signature. The live preview updates as you drag the slider.

Is the watermark tool free?
Yes, free. You add your own watermark text and we never stamp our own logo on top. No account required, no batch limit.

Does it work on mobile?
Yes. The watermark preview supports touch — drag the text to position it, use the sliders to adjust size and opacity, all on your phone screen.

Are my images stored on your server?
No. The watermarking process is entirely in-memory: your image is loaded, the text overlay is composited at your chosen position and opacity, and the result is returned. Both the source image and the watermarked output are dropped from RAM immediately. We don't retain filenames, watermark text, or any trace of your upload.