Create a Watermark with WaterMarkLib to Prevent Photos From Being Stolen [Windows]

I have had images stolen from not only my website but from posts I do on various other websites as well. There is one way to make sure that if someone DOES steal your images, you can still get some credit for your hard work. I am talking about software that will create a watermark for your photos.

Watermarking is the process of adding an identifying tag to your image – it can either be text or an image.WaterMarkLib makes this process easy for you. WaterMarkLib is a small download weighing in at 2.7MB. We have shown you online watermarkers before and Jim has even gone out of his way to show you 4 ways to watermark your images online.

This one however, resides on YOUR machine.

Once you extract the installer you will have to run through the basic setup clicks. You know, hit next, next, finish.

When you launch the application you will get a screen that looks similar to this. For some reason, it seems to only open in full screen but that aside, this is a great utility and very easy to use. Start by clicking File – Open and open an image. It seems to recognize all the formats I threw at it including: JPG, GIF and PNG.

Let’s start watermarking. You can either hit the Tool menu or there is also an icon on the tool bar that will allow you to add a text or image watermark. We will start by walking you through creating a text watermark.

After you hit the Text Watermark button or icon, you will get a screen that looks like the one below. You get to choose your font, size, opacity, color, drop shadow and even rotation. Opacity simply means the level of transparency i.e. how much of it can been seen through. So by putting the opacity around 20 or 30%, you can still see through your watermark onto your image. Go ahead and add some text and options. Then hit OK.

Then you will see your image with the watermark in the center. You can just grab the text with your mouse and place it where you would like to. I like to put my watermarks in the bottom right hand corner of the image like so:

Next, if you want to save your image, you should setup the output directory – this is so you do not overwrite your original image. After selecting a directory, you can simply hit the Save button and your watermarked image will be saved to your output directory and won’t affect the original image.

Next up, let’s take a look at adding an image as a watermark. It is almost the same as adding text – but with image options as you can see in the shot below:

Once your image is on the screen, you can move it with your mouse just like the text.

I could not figure out how to use the batch feature to apply a watermark onto several images at once. The tutorial on their website returned a 404 so if you do figure it out let us know!

Do you have another method to create a watermark for your images? Do you or don’t you watermark? We would love to hear from you in the comments!