Adding watermarks to your images and photos is a great first step toward protecting your content as well as brand it. This article takes a look at the why and how of image & branding watermarks. We’re using two helpful how-to tutorial videos that cover everything you need to get started. After you’ve read this post and watched the short how-to videos, you should be well on your way to creating watermarks on your own absolutely free since we’re using freely available software – Paint.net.
What Are Watermarks?
A watermark is a simple identifying mark, such as your name, company, URL or logo that is embedded directly into the image or photo. Watermarks are often semi transparent (see-through) so it’s not so distracting. Branding watermarks are often placed on a location of the image where it would be difficult to remove by image thieves.
Why Add Watermarks?
First, we should take on the question of adding image watermarks and whether or not they are necessary or beneficial. There are two main reasons to add watermarks and we’ll take a look at both.
- Watermarking for copyright protection – Image theft, as well as bandwidth theft, are serious problems online. Many people online don’t realise they are using copyrighted images while others simply don’t care. You took great care to create that image or shoot the perfect photograph and if you don’t want others to use it as their own image, adding a watermark is the first step of protecting your copyright.
- Branding Watermarks – Branding is huge and whether you want to display your logo or just your company’s name or URL in text, watermarking is a simple way to achieve that type of basic image branding. In the next section, Sheryl shows how to accomplish just in a short how-to video.
How To Create Image Watermarks
In this video, Sheryl Loch shows you step-by-step how to create a watermark using the free desktop image editing software – Paint.net. We have many Paint.net tutorial videos and more are on ther way so be sure to subscibe to our YouTube channel for new ones.
How To Place Branding Watermarks
If you need a little more on actually placing the watermark you created from the video above, Sheryl has a separate tutorial video for that:
Related Video: Why Watermark Your Videos
Watermark WordPress Plugin?
[UPDATE] I haven’t used this plugin but Sire from WassupBlog brought this to my attention via the comments below. It’s called Watermark Reloaded and Watermark Reloaded Pro (Paid). Like I said, I haven’t used it myself so be sure to research it as well as read the comments on the plugin pages. I read a few of the comments and replies in the FAQ section and I did see a few issues that concerns me. First, it looks like you can not use different watermarks for different images. Second, you can not watermark the featured image. It’s certainly not the perfect solution but for bloggers that don’t want to deal with image editing at all, it could be an option. There may be alternative plugins as well, I haven’t checked.
Did That Help?
I hope that helped you understand watermarking and how to create your own. Feel free to post any questions or comments below.
About Brian D. Hawkins
Well this was a great post most of the people just google the images and paste them on their blogs without even realizing that Google might flag this as copyrighted content.
I don’t think Google has much to do with it Prateek but we need to use images that we have proper rights or permission to., absolutely.
Watermarks are useful to enhance the traffic by images. However, I already knew about watermarks but thanks for reminding me again.
That’s what we’re here for Ayesha. 😉
Hi
I’ve seen many blogger use watermark images but frankly speaking i never used them.
I think watermark images can bring you more traffic & can help your blog known in blogging community.
I don’t always watermark Tauseef but I think it’s a good habit to get into.
watermarks also shows your brand and uniqueness of your pics… I always use picasa for adding it to my website pictures
Thanks for that Himanshu, I didn’t even realize we could add watermarks with Picasa.
Hi Brain,
That was awesome tips. I too use image water marks for my images in my blog. I love to find new ways to add water marks. And adding watermarks we really deserve copyrights . Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Tharun, I don’t necessarily love it but it’s a necessary evil.
That was a wonderful article, I also uses watermarks for my blog posts. Thanks a lot for providing valuable video’s that help me a lot in learning some new things@Hawkins.
My pleasure Vikas, I hope it helps.
If you create an image and if it goes viral, your brand will get popular and traffic will boost. So if it is an original image, you should definitely watermark it.
I have a Mac app by which I do so.
That would really suck if something took off and was no longer linked to our sites Anchit, I totally agree.
I actually bought some software ages ago so that I could place watermarks on the photos I used on my photo blogs. Like you said in the post, it was to both protect the image and to promote my site. I stopped using it after awhile because I just got lazy.Now I have a plugin that automatically places a watermark on my images which is so much easier.
What can I say, if I can automate the process I will. 😉
That’s pretty cool Sire, I didn’t even know there were WordPress plugins for watermarks. Care to share the name of it, I’d like to check it out?
Sure, it’s called Watermark Reloaded Pro. Here’s is the link http://eappz.eu/en/products/watermark-reloaded-pro/
Thanks for that Sire, I updated the post and linked to it. I appreciate that. 🙂
Good tips Brian! It’s so true that you have to protect your brand and copyright online much more than offline! Moreover, watermarks can bring you more traffic (which is what we all want, right?)
Is the Paint.net software an easy one to work with (for a newwbie)?
Thanks again! Great post!
Truthfully Katrin, Any of the complete editing programs will have a learning curve but Paint.net is much easier than Photoshop. If you watch a few YouTube videos and play with it for a while, I think you’ll find it pretty fun.
Good tutorial for adding watermarks to your blog images but i think most of the images on the blog are taken from the internet from other blogs and website, but if you have your own original image then adding watermark makes sense.