There has been some talk around here about the use of watermarks. I have never had to use them, so I thought I would look into it and let you all know what I found out.

Firstly, at present all of the websites that I post my images on are for photography or photographers, so they have the security measures of the right-click-save disabled, and so forth. But after this was brought up here, and I looked into it, I decided it might be about time I start doing adding a watermark also.

One myth out there with the average website or blog is with those who talk about open source with regards to images. These are sites that do not use the right-click-save feature, and so forth. The ones that do when you right click, it eather does nothing, or it pops up a flag with the copyright and the photographers name.

In a moment I'm going to share with you how to add a watermark using the PicMonkey tool, for those of us who have the Standard Club membership plan, who can edit after upload.

Below are some 'arguements' for why it is important to think about using a watermark. My source is a forum discussion I took part in on Fine Art America here.

1. It is important to have the option to customize watermarks with artist name. Images do get ripped off all the time. But when they don't have your name on them, it simply does not benefit you at all. A watermark with your name has some minimal benefit in terms of not only attribution but legal standing in the USA.

2. Removing a watermark with a copyright owner's name is a crime, and if you are caught doing it you could owe a lot - plus legal costs. In a civil courtroom we only need to convince the judge they cropped it off better than you convince her that they didn't. You are not innocent until proven guilty in civil court in the USA.

3. There is just so much misinformation being spread around by all sides. By the same token nearly half of the population believes an un-watermarked image is copyright free. It’s a frustrating battle trying to convince people they can’t do whatever they want with our stuff because it’s online and not watermarked.

4. The argument is never that a watermark is going to stop anything. It’s that it puts you in a better position and gives people fewer excuses to be denying you compensation or at least attribution for your work.

5. Point is, all of this has to be framed in the context of business and what makes business sense, not in the context of you're angry because someone is stealing from you.
There is an example of the watermark in the picture above that I plan to use
  • You have to go into PicMonkey and use the text tool,
  • then make it white or black,
  • then fade it so that it doesn't over power the image.
There is no way to save it to PicMonkey in the Hub mentioned, at this link because it is actually our ipernity account.

One thing to keep in mind is that once you add the watermark to your image, you might want to make a copy of it. For if you want to do something else with that image you won't be able to remove the watermark that easy. For example, many of my images are for sale as art photography. Collectors don't want my watermark on their art.

Hope you found this informative. Please share your experiences in the comments so we can all learn together.

Thank you for reading.

Frank J Casella
www.frankjcasella.ipernity.com