WatermarkPictureStart
A snowy peak over a still lake with “© Alpine Light” set in the bottom right corner
A corner mark inside the safe area, sized as a share of the frame width.

Watermark guides: five, and what each one argues

The tool is three settings and a button. The decisions around it are harder than that, and these are the ones that come up every time.

Why there are only five

A page of thirty short articles about watermarking would be easy to produce and worth nothing to read. Most questions people arrive with collapse into two long ones — is a visible mark actually protecting anything, and how do I put the same mark on four hundred files without opening four hundred files — and each of those got a piece of its own.

Three shorter ones cover the decisions that follow: how much of the picture to cover, how to stamp a scan without spoiling it, and how to prepare a logo so it still reads small and translucent. The first guide spends most of its length on the limits, because the limits are what nobody selling a watermarking tool wants to put in writing.

What is not written yet

One subject comes up often enough to deserve a page and does not have one, and saying so is cheaper than implying otherwise:

  • Whether a mark is worth anything when a picture ends up in a training set. Nobody can answer that honestly yet, which is exactly why it is not written up as though somebody could.

When it is written it will appear on this page. Nothing else will: this site marks pictures, and a guide about something it does not do would be a guide about somewhere else.

Or go and mark something