Adding Watermarks To Your Photos

I saw this beauty outside my office today.  It has quite unique colors. 

I want to discuss today about copyrighting your photos by inserting watermarks on them.  The technique I used before to add copyright information on my photos was to simply open my photos in Paint and insert a line with my text data.  I would press the alt, and the numbers 0, 1, 6, 9 simultaneously to get the copyright code ©.  I could not put the text in the center of my photo because the text was not transparent and it would have blocked that particular area of my photo.  So most times I would put the text at the bottom right of my photos.

I was working on my Zenfolio photo gallery and realized that Zenfolio has a feature that allows you to easily insert watermarks on your photos and in batches.  But in order for me to have access to this feature, I have to upgrade my account.  I decided against doing that as I am not getting much traffic to this site at the moment and watermarking them would not increase traffic to the site.  So I decided to find a free way to insert watermarks on my photos.

I found this application waterMark V2 - it is free to download and it is very simple to use.  The watermarks can be saved (this feature allows me to create different watermarks for my different websites and blogs) and  you can easily watermark more than one photo at a time. 

Why I watermark photos?  Well it is a good way to identify myself as the photographer of my photos and it is also a way for deterring other people from stealing my photos.  Now before I would insert my information at the bottom of my photos but a photo can be easily cropped to remove that information and the cropped photo can then be used by someone else as their own.  To eliminate that problem, I decided to insert my information in the center of my photos and information has to be as light as possible.

I have been able to achieve this using this free software waterMark V2.  In my photo above you will notice my watermark in center of my photo.