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Top 10 Free Watermark Apps to Protect Photos Online & Off

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Seeking free watermark apps?

Protect your images from content theft with a visual watermark.

Whether you’d like to download free watermark software to your computer, or prefer to watermark online, you’re covered here.

Find the Ultimate List of websites where you can watermark photos free!

You’ll also discover some graphic design tools to add watermarks, and learn how to use Canva for this purpose.

Let’s go!

Watermark photos free download or online header graphic.

Disclosure: Some links in this post may be affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase, I may receive a referral fee, at no cost to you.

Why Watermark Your Photos?

Before we dive into some free watermark software, let’s think about why you should add a watermark to images.

The process of watermarking is a bit like an artist signing a painting, but for the digital age.

Watermarks help photographers, graphic designers, bloggers, and other online creators to make sure their work is credited to them properly.

The easiest way to do this is to ‘sign’ your digital art with a watermark.

While content thieves abound and we can’t completely stop them, watermarking is a deterrent, since it stakes your claim on your creations.

In short, watermarks help protect your images from content theft.

Is There a Case Against Watermarking?

In recent times, there’s been a bit of a move against watermarking.

Not so much for photographers or digital artists, but for others who take photos and use them in their business.

The main reason for this is social media marketing.

Sure, watermarked images do work on social media. But if the watermark obscures the photo or impacts it by being too obvious, people might not engage with the image as enthusiastically.

The answer? Keep it subtle and simple.

I recommend you add basic branding, such as your website name, when you create Pinterest Pins. Or add a faded logo in the corner of an Instagram post.

Test to see what works for your eye and your audience.

How to Watermark Photos FREE!

Here are 15 great sites to choose from!

Each listing first specifies whether you’ll watermark online or download software, then you’ll see the website address.

Each site works a bit differently, so check out a couple. Click on each heading to visit the site.

If you try any, please give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down!

You can vote for your favorites right on the list! And Save this post to Pinterest so you can refer back for more options.

How to Create a Transparent Watermark in Canva

Your favorite design tool or app to add text to photos will work to add a watermark as well.

A couple of my favorite easy-peasy online tools are Snappa and Stencil.

If you’re a Canva user, you can also easily create a transparent watermark to add to images there.

If you import your photo to Canva and create it into the size you require (here we show the Instagram square size), you can add an icon, logo, or even text to it.

how to add your watermark icon in canva.

Once you have added whatever you want to be the watermark (in this example, we used the quill and books icon), you can use the transparency setting to make it less obvious.

Adjust it until you are happy with how it looks, then download your photo for use.

how to adjust opacity of watermark icon in canva.

You can also move the watermark as needed if it works best in different places in different photos.

Plus if you use an icon that can have colors changed, you can alter this so the watermark shows up on different backgrounds.

Check out Canva now.

Easy Watermark Options

These free tools offer easy ways to watermark your designs and photos.

Plus you can use a graphic design tool like Canva to easily create a custom watermark or add unobtrusive branding.

That way people know an image is yours – but you still get the full benefits of using it online.

Share with your friends and followers so they can learn how to watermark photos free.

pinnable image with text saying watermark photos free download or online.

Comments

  1. This article is very informative on several watermarking tools. Now I can easily watermark many images for free.

    Reply

    • If a real human being visits the post they could add it to the queue for possible inclusion. We don’t allow bot comments or links in comments.

      Reply

  3. I tried several of them you mentioned and did not work for me; I like to put my site name on my photos exactly right bottom corner with specific margin. It failed when the width and height ratio changes. But, I do not want to change one by one using photo shop or any app.
    I couldn’t find one doing exactly like that.

    So, I just developed one. If it’s simple text watermark (I do not support image yet), this must work for many with one click. I spent two week on this and does not want to use it myself.

    I put it into windows app store with “Bulk Photo Editor”. (only for windows 10)

    Please let me know if it’s worth to improve further with rotation, image watermark..

    Thank you,

    Reply

  4. I’m using cdWorks Photo Helper too. I can not only watermark my photos, but also manage EXIF data and edit picture data. Good one!

    Reply

  5. Water marquee, cdWorks and umark are one of the best watermark
    software to use. You have listed almost all the good software to use for watermark. Thanks for sharing your valuable information.

    Reply

  6. Thanks for sharing!
    VisualWatermark is very good and I have been using it for a while. But I got a better tool from GOTD a few days ago named PT Watermark. After using it a few days, now I feel it’s probably the best (both in quality and efficiency) watermarking software in the market. Hope you like it too 🙂

    Reply

  7. UMark is a notable tool I had been using since long to watermark my images for copyright protection. On similar grounds, I’d like to introduce you to Canva. Give it a try. Is it worth adding to this list?

    Reply

    • Hi Garg,

      I’ve written about Canva many times. I think of it as a lot more than a watermark tool, but it certainly could be used for that.

      Thanks for the suggestion!

      Reply

  8. Hello! We have released our first version of free watermarking tool at watermark.top. It has few interesting features and might be useful for many. Tool is new and still under development. I hope you would like it 🙂 tips and comments are highly appreciated! Thank you.

    Robert

    Reply

  12. Awesome, lets see what works … I am trying Visualwatermark.com … hope it will be exactly what I am looking for ..
    Cheers!

    Reply

  14. I use iWatermark on my Mac, Windows tablet and iPhone and it works great! It’s definitely my favorite and I believe they have versions for Mac, Windows, Android and iOS. Check it out 🙂

    Reply

    • Thanks for the recommendation, Susan! Since the post is only FREE apps, I can’t add it, but it’s nice to hear you like it.

      Reply

  18. Hello Louise. Maybe you can help me? I used paint in my windows program to add a text box to many pictures thinking it would act as a watermark. Not ever doing this before, I made the mistake of not checking it out first and now half these pictures are marked with no way to remove the text box. The paint program has no way to remove them, and in my photo program I cannot return it to original. Is there a way to remove these text boxes without ruining my beautiful photos? Thank you for any help you can give to me.

    Reply

    • Hi Katherine,
      Unfortunately, if you can’t remove the text boxes in the program that created them, I really don’t know how you would do it.

      Any chance you have a backup copy of your photos on your phone, camera, or elsewhere? Sorry I couldn’t help.

      Reply

    • Hi Woo,
      Watermarks are visible, so you don’t need software. If it’s metadata you’re after, several Adobe programs can read it, like Photoshop and Bridge. A Google search will net you some websites. I haven’t used them so I can’t recommend one.

      Louise

      Reply

  21. Hello Louise,

    Thanks for this interesting & wonderful post. I came across while looking for some tools coz I had plans to have my photography blog 🙂

    Reply

    • You are most welcome, Euphonos (lovely sounding name, right? 🙂 )

      Best wishes on your photography blog!

      Reply

  22. Hi Louise…!!!
    Great work… I google for best watermark and it shows me a list of Watermark software. I confused which is best?
    Then I head over to your website and I found my answer. Just Downloaded Visual watermark.
    Thanks for sharing

    Reply

  24. Louise, thanks for this list of watermark software, its hard for us this days to secure out photos online, since I am studying to be a photographer, watermarking software is so important, thanks so much!

    Reply

  25. waw, I was really wondering if you knew how to add a symbol to the watermark. Like the name and a little symbol like a small diamond or something.

    Reply

    • If you don’t have a symbol font, try googling “special characters.”

      I’m not on a PC so I don’t know if this will work, but it’s worth a try!

      Reply

  27. I was wondering if you knew how to add a symbol to the watermark. Like the name and a little symbol like a small diamond or something.

    Reply

    • Hey Crystal,
      I doubt that any of these free programs would allow you to do that easily. You’d probably need to create an art file that you could overlay in a graphics program, or on pixlr.com.

      Reply

    • Most fonts have special symbols. You can access them by pressing a shortcut on your keyboard or using a special app – Character Map.

      Both Windows and Mac have programs that show a complete list of all available characters. On Windows, it’s under Start – All Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Character Map menu item. Start it. Find a symbol you want, click the Select button. Then click Copy to save the symbol into your clipboard. Switch to the watermarking program and paste the symbol (Ctrl + V) in a text field.

      This will work for every program you have. Should it be Microsoft Word or Google Chrome.

      Reply

      • That’s a fantastic tip, thanks Ivan!

        When I need symbols, I usually just paste in a symbol font, but this will be more flexible. I just never remember how to find those secret characters on Mac!

        I prefer to believe it’s from being blond rather than senile 😉

        Reply

          • That one I know oh-so-well 😉 It’s the shapes and smileys that I’m not sure about on Mac. We don’t have all the keyboard codes with strings of numbers – at least I’m not aware of it!

            Some icons sent from Windows aren’t recognized on Mac as well.

    • Glad you enjoyed it! I’m surprised by the immense popularity of this post. So glad you’re finding it useful!

      Reply

  30. Hello. Recently I created a page from within my personal Facebook profile. The page is to show friends and family some stuff I´m selling. My idea is to label the pictures as things get sold. I´ve been looking all over for online image editing tools for adding watermarks to photos on this page, but all these tools will only allow me to edit my profile pictures, but the ones in the page won´t be listed or appear anywhere. Any ideas on how to deal with this problem?

    Reply

    • Hi Andrew. I think you’re wanting to add a watermark (or “sold” verbiage) to photos that are already on Facebook? I don’t know of a way to do that.

      You could add it in a comment or the description, or just delete the photo.

      Reply

  31. hi dear louise , good time
    sorry , How can I add watermark to some special pages while other pages without watermark in word2007?

    Reply

    • I’m sorry Hossein, I don’t work with Word. These watermark tools are for photos and other images.

      Best of luck with it!

      Reply

  32. i think the best solution to watermark the images still remaining photoshop or imagemagick

    i use them since awhile and im very happy

    Reply

    • Absolutely Bratari! If you have the images open already in an image editor like Photoshop, watermark them right then. Saves time!

      Have a great day!

      Reply

  33. Wow, great list, I loved the tool you embeded to show the list. It was worth the visit to your blog, I got both the useful tools to watermark and an awesome list making tool.

    Reply

  34. Hi Louise,
    thanks for your great work on it.
    i’ll try Visual Watermark – it seems very good and has high rates in cnet and softpedia.
    Regards

    Reply

  35. I’m planning to post some photos on my site and looking for the ways to add watermark, the information on this article definitely helps. Thank you !

    Reply

  37. Great info to have. Protecting our online properties is harder than ever, and pictures are especially easy to pilfer. So hats off for a good set of sites and tools that can help.

    Reply

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