Image Watermark

Add a text watermark to images — single or tiled.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your data is never uploaded, never stored, and never leaves your device.

Stamps a line of your own text over a photograph — once in a corner or the centre, or repeated diagonally across the whole frame — and burns it into the pixels of a new PNG.

How to use it

1Drop in the image, then type your Watermark text (it starts as © My Watermark).
2Choose a Position — Tiled, Center or any of the four corners — and set the Opacity slider and the Color.
3Check the preview, which redraws on every change, then press Download PNG.

Example

Input: A 1600 × 900 photo, text © Studio, position Tiled, opacity 0.35
Output: watermarked.png at the original 1600 × 900, the text repeated at a 30° tilt in 80px type

There is no size control: the text is always 5% of the image's width, so it scales with the picture — 80px on a 1600px-wide photo, and never below 12px on a small one. The output is always PNG whatever you put in, so a watermarked JPEG usually comes back several times heavier than the original. Clearing the text box removes the preview rather than producing an untouched copy.

What happens to your data

The composite is made at full resolution in your tab: the original is decoded into an Image element, drawn onto a canvas sized to its own naturalWidth and naturalHeight, and re-encoded there — so the un-watermarked copy, the one actually worth protecting, never leaves the machine. That re-encode also copies pixels and nothing else, which means every EXIF field the original carried — camera body, capture time, GPS position — is absent from the PNG you download.

Last updated August 2026

A client wants to see the shoot before they have paid for it. Product photos are going onto a marketplace where anyone can right-click. A scan has to go to a broker who only needs to look at it once. All three want an image good enough to judge and awkward enough to reuse.

Decide between two kinds of mark before you start, because they solve different problems. A single line in a corner keeps the photograph readable and reads as a credit rather than a barrier, but it is ten seconds of cropping from gone. Text repeated across the frame survives cropping, since no rectangle is left without some of it, at the cost of a picture nobody enjoys looking at. Proofs and document scans want the repeated version; work you are publishing on purpose wants the corner.

Be clear too that the mark is burnt into the pixels: no layer to switch off later, no password that lifts it, no route back to the clean image from the file you download. Treat the marked copy as the thing you hand out, and keep the original safe.

The mistake that catches most people is colour. The text starts white, which disappears on a bright sky, a white backdrop or a document scan, and there is no outline or shadow behind the letters to rescue it. Judge the preview against the palest part of the picture, not the darkest — and if it is still hard to read, mid-grey at higher opacity beats white at any setting.

How it works

Toolvore draws your image onto a canvas the size of the file itself — its own natural width and height, so nothing is resampled — then writes the text over the top and re-encodes the result. The type is sized from the image rather than your screen, and the slider sets the alpha the letters are painted at, from 0.05 to 1 in steps of 0.05. In the repeating mode the canvas is rotated 30 degrees about its centre and filled with copies spaced by the measured width of your text plus four line heights across and five down, which is why a long line tiles more sparsely than a short one; the corner marks sit inset from the edge by exactly one character height. Everything redraws the moment you change anything, so there is no convert step. The limits are worth stating plainly: one line of text, one system sans-serif, always bold, no rotation on the corner marks, no logo or image watermark, no outline behind the glyphs, and one photo at a time.

Common use cases

Sending unpaid proofs to a client
Marking product shots before a marketplace listing
Stamping a document scan with what it was sent for
Adding a studio credit to images going out on social
Labelling internal screenshots that should not circulate
Putting a copyright line on portfolio uploads

Frequently asked questions

Does a watermark actually stop people using my photos?＋

Not in the sense of making the image unusable — it raises the cost. A mark across the middle of the frame means anyone reposting has to leave your name on it or do visible repair work, and crude attempts show. A corner credit stops nothing technical; it travels with the file, so whoever finds the picture three reposts later can still see whose it is. Content-aware fill and the removal tools that followed have made clean removal far easier than it was, which argues for the repeated mark on work nobody has paid for yet.

What colour and opacity should a watermark be?＋

Judge contrast against what sits behind the letters, not brightness in the abstract. White works on darker photographs, black or grey on bright ones, and mid-grey is safest when one frame holds both a sky and a shadow, because no single colour survives that at low opacity. The slider starts at 0.35, which suits a repeated mark people are meant to read past; a corner credit usually reads better nearer 0.6, since it competes with only one small patch of image. Below about 0.15 you are relying on the viewer's screen being bright.

Do I need a watermark to own the copyright on my photos?＋

No. In the UK and in every country signed up to the Berne Convention, copyright exists in a photograph from the moment it is taken — nothing to register, no notice to add. What a mark does is practical rather than legal: it attaches your name to a file that will sooner or later lose its caption, and makes it harder to claim nobody knew who took the picture. The © symbol grants no extra rights by itself, though it signals intent. On a Mac it is Option and G; on Windows, Alt and 0169 on the keypad.

Is it worth watermarking a scan of my passport or a bank statement?＋

Marking a document scan with what it was sent for is one of the better uses of a watermark, and it is standard advice when handing identity documents to a letting agent, a broker or an exchange. Write the purpose and the date rather than your name — on the lines of 'for tenancy application only, 14 August 2026' — and repeat it across the page so it cannot be cropped away. Keep it legible without burying the details underneath, since a scan the recipient cannot read is one they will ask for again.

Are my photos uploaded anywhere when I add a watermark?＋

No. The file you drop never leaves the tab: it becomes an object URL pointing at memory on your own machine, is decoded into an image element there, and is composited on a canvas in the same page. The preview is that finished canvas, and the download button is an ordinary link pointing at it rather than a request to a server — which is the part that matters, because the copy actually worth protecting is the one without a watermark on it. Load a second photo and the first is released.

Does adding a watermark reduce the quality of the photo?＋

Not the pixels underneath it. The canvas matches the image's own dimensions, so nothing is scaled down, and the download is lossless — a JPEG that has been through this once has not been compressed a second time and gains no new artefacts. The cost lands on file size instead, because lossless compression is a poor fit for photographs. If the destination cares about weight more than fidelity, put the result through an image compressor, or convert it back to JPEG and take one generation of loss there rather than on the way in.

Can I watermark a whole folder at once?＋

No — one image at a time, and dropping a folder or a multiple selection takes only the first file. What makes repeat work bearable is that the settings stay put: text, position, opacity and colour survive when you load the next photo, so a set of twenty is twenty drops and twenty downloads rather than twenty setups. Every file also saves under the same name, so the downloads folder fills with watermarked.png, watermarked(1).png and so on. Rename as you go if the order will not tell you which is which.

Can I use a logo image, or an invisible watermark instead?＋

Neither is on offer here — this stamps a line of text you type and nothing else. Invisible marking is a different discipline: metadata fields such as IPTC Creator and Copyright ride inside the file and are read by stock libraries and image search, while forensic and steganographic marks hide a pattern in the pixels that can survive re-encoding. Both share a weakness: a screenshot or a re-save through a social platform strips them, and neither shows a human anything. A canvas carries pixels and nothing else, so metadata set on the original does not come through.