Add Watermark to Photo — free online tool
Stamp text over a photo and control the size, colour, opacity, angle and position. No watermark of ours on the result, and no upload to a server.
About the Add watermark tool
A watermark is a claim of authorship written onto the picture itself. It travels with the file when someone saves it, screenshots it or re-uploads it somewhere else, which is the whole point — unlike metadata or a caption, it cannot be stripped by right-clicking. Photographers, illustrators and anyone sending proofs to a client use one for exactly that reason.
The hard part is the balance. A watermark faint enough to ignore is also faint enough to crop or clone out; one bold enough to be uncroppable ruins the image for the person you are showing it to. The usual compromise is moderate opacity — somewhere between 30 and 50 percent — placed over a busy region rather than a flat one, because flat areas are trivial to repair and detailed ones are not. If the image genuinely must not be reused, tiling across the whole frame is the only placement that resists cropping outright.
Corners are the conventional choice for proofs and portfolio pieces, where the watermark is a signature rather than a lock. Bottom right is the most common, partly by convention and partly because it is where the eye lands last. The one thing to avoid is placing it over the subject of the photo, which reads as carelessness rather than protection.
It is worth being honest about what this achieves. A visible watermark deters casual reuse and makes ownership obvious at a glance, and for most purposes that is enough. It will not stop someone determined, because modern editing tools remove them with increasing ease. Treat it as a clear statement of authorship, not as a technical guarantee, and it will do the job people actually need from it.
How it works
Load the photo
Drop in the image you want to mark. It stays on your device — nothing is sent anywhere at any point.
Write and style your text
Type the text, then set the size, colour, opacity, angle and position. The preview updates as you adjust each one.
Save the marked copy
Download the result. Your original stays clean, so you can produce a differently marked version whenever you need one.
Frequently asked questions
- What opacity works best?
- Between 30 and 50 percent suits most images: clearly legible, but not fighting the photograph. Go lower on light or minimal images where any mark stands out anyway, and higher on busy ones where a faint overlay simply disappears. Look at the preview at full size before deciding — a watermark that reads well on a small preview often vanishes on the real thing.
- Where should I position it?
- Bottom right is the convention for signatures and portfolio work. For client proofs where reuse is the concern, put it over a detailed part of the image rather than a plain sky or wall, since flat regions are easy to paint out. When the image must not be reused at all, tiled placement across the frame is the only option that survives cropping.
- Can the watermark be removed?
- By someone determined, often yes — cloning, content-aware fill and AI inpainting all handle corner marks readily, particularly over uniform backgrounds. A watermark is a deterrent and a statement of ownership, not encryption. Tiling at moderate opacity over detailed areas is much harder to undo cleanly, which is why proofing services use it.
- Does Owreeka add its own watermark to my image?
- No. The only text on the output is the text you typed. There is no branding, no badge, no "made with" strip, and no watermark-free upgrade to buy — the site is funded by advertising rather than by holding your results hostage. What you download is your image with your mark on it and nothing else.
- Can I use a logo image instead of text?
- This tool marks with text only. A text mark covers the majority of cases — a name, a studio, a copyright line, a PROOF or DRAFT stamp — and keeps the whole thing to a single step. If you need a graphic logo composited onto a photo, that is an image-editing job and a layer-based editor will serve you better.
- Why is my watermark blurry or badly sized?
- Font size is in pixels, so the same number looks very different on a 6000-pixel photo than on an 800-pixel one. If the text looks tiny, raise the size substantially rather than nudging it. If it looks soft, check you are working from the full-resolution original rather than a small copy that was already scaled down.
- Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
- No. The image is drawn to a canvas and the text is composited on top entirely within your browser tab, then read back out as a download. Nothing is transmitted or stored, which matters when the photos you are marking are unreleased client work.