What copyright is and when it starts
Copyright is the right to decide who copies, publishes and adapts your work. For a photograph it belongs to the person who took it (or their employer, for work done in a job) and it starts when the picture is taken. India’s Copyright Act, like the law of every country in the Berne Convention, asks for no registration and no notice before the right exists. Registration is available and can help in a dispute; a © line is not registration.
The © line and the metadata field
This page writes the claim twice. On the picture: “© {year} {creator}”, where the tokens are filled for each file — the year from the camera data when there is one, the creator from the field under Export. In the file: the same name in the copyright fields the format has. The line on the picture survives a screenshot; the metadata does not, but it survives being emailed or downloaded and is what search tools and stock agencies read.
| JPG | Exif Artist (0x013B) and Copyright (0x8298), written into the file and read back to check. |
|---|---|
| PNG | tEXt chunks named Author and Copyright. |
| WebP | No credit written. Rebuilding a WebP container to add one risks a file that opens in some viewers and not others. |
| Everything else | The camera, lens, time and GPS location the original carried are not copied into the saved file. |
Year, name and wording
The conventional notice is the symbol, the year of first publication and the owner’s name: “© 2026 Asha Rao”. “All rights reserved” adds nothing legally in most countries today but reads as a clear statement and fits the file’s copyright field well. A studio name works as the owner if the studio owns the work. Keep the mark short; every extra word makes the mark wider for the same type size. Other tokens — {name}, {n}, {date} — are there for numbering proofs or dating document copies.
What a mark adds, and what it does not
- It adds a visible claim and a name to contact — useful when a picture is shared without its caption.
- It does not make copying legal or illegal; the law does that with or without the mark.
- It does not stop removal. A corner © is cropped off in seconds; see the crop check on the placement page.
The guide on what a watermark protects goes through the rest of that argument.
Copyright watermark questions
Do I need a © mark to own my photo?
No. In India and in the other countries of the Berne Convention, copyright in a photograph exists from the moment it is taken, without any notice or registration. The © line is a notice: it tells people the picture is claimed and by whom. It does not create the right, and leaving it off does not give the right away.
What year should I use?
The year the picture was first published, or taken. The {year} token uses the year the camera recorded in the file when it has one, and this year otherwise — the panel says which it used — so a folder from several years marks each picture with its own year.
Is my name written into the file too?
Yes, on this page the credit switch is on from the start: JPG files get your name in the Exif Artist and Copyright fields, and PNG files in Author and Copyright text chunks. WebP files leave without a credit, and the export panel says so. Most social sites strip this metadata on upload, so treat it as a record for people who receive the file directly.