It is important to hold the rights to any product you have. Software and service providers use license keys to identify whether the user is a legal user or a pirated one. As in the case of painting, a painter leaves a sign or a signature while painting their photos in order to claim their property. Similarly, digital images must be signed digitally and watermark is a digital signature that ensures artists’ rights.
Reason to Watermark Your Work
If you are an artist and have regular images or masterpieces created by you, you will know the reason why you need to watermark images. Someone can misuse your images without your consent and you can face piracy issues.
If you are selling your images than watermarking them is important to protect your intellectual property. You can write company’s name or the name of the owner of the company on the image as a watermark which works as a stamp for your images.
Importance of Watermark
Watermarks are your legal stamp that ensures that your work is yours only. This means that your work cannot be illegally used at any place. Artists and designers put their passion while working for their products and letting them go away easily is indeed not something that anyone would prefer.
Nowadays, Social Media hits the internet like a storm and everyone is so attached to it. Only a few social media platforms such as Flicker, Picasa, Pinterest, Instagram and others are totally dedicated to image sharing. Just imagine, how many images are floating around the internet? And you won’t believe how many designers and artists are working day and night to produce quality images. Now, they won’t let these images go without their consent and copyrights.
Adding watermark to your images will not only protect your images but also increase your online popularity as well. It can become an excellent resource to add more customers to your website.
How to Protect Your Images?
On a serious note, it is not easy to protect your images once they are online. This online image piracy has developed into an industry of its own. One thing that you can do is add Copyright Management Information (CMI) to your image files.
To bring the culprit in front of a Judge, it is necessary to use the federal legal system and requires registration of your copyrights with the federal US Copyright Office. Hence, once watermarked make sure that all your copyrights are registered.
How to Watermark Images in WordPress?
WordPress has become one of the leading CMS for not only IT Professionals, Web developers but also Bloggers belonging to variable fields of life. It offers a solution for every content related problem. In this section, I am going to cover how you can watermark your images in WordPress.
Today, I am going to cover a couple of plugins that can help you watermark your images in WordPress.
Easy Watermark
First up on our list is Easy Watermark. Easy Watermark helps you watermark your images automatically as they are directly uploaded to WordPress media library. You can have a bulk of watermark images which you can use to watermark both, text & images. So, let’s get started.
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Install the plugin from here.
Once installed, navigate to Settings > Easy Watermark.
You can choose auto watermark feature here and also select which image types will be watermarked.
In “Watermark Type” section you can select the type of watermark you desire. You can choose whether you want an image or text or both used as a watermark.
In the Image tab, you can select which image can be used as a watermark. If you have selected Text only or Image + Text as watermark than you have to set the text in next tab.
Write the text in the text box that you want to use as watermark. You can select the offsets and font as well.
Click the “Save” button after all settings are done. Watermark will be automatically added to your images now.
How to add watermark to already uploaded images
In order to add watermark to a previously present image, go to Media > Easy Watermark and inside Bulk Watermark option click the “Start” button. As soon as you click, your watermark will be added to all your images.
Image Watermark
The second Watermark plugin on our list is Image Watermark. This plugin also helps you to automatically add watermark to your images and also supports Bulk option. It is easy to setup Image Watermark plugin. Here is how this plugin works:
In the settings panel just turn on the “Enable watermark” and this will automatically watermark every uploaded image after it.
You can also select on which sizes watermarks should be applied to.
Here you can set the image to be used as watermark and below you can see the preview of watermark as well.
You can also set the size of watermark, offset and the opacity level as well.
Make sure you backup your images before watermarking them, because once watermarked, you cannot convert them back to the original format in most cases.
Concluding Thoughts
So that’s all for today. Following are the two plugins that I will recommend most of my readers to watermark their images. It is important in today’s world that you properly choose watermarking and keep your content safe from piracy and illegal use. However, it strongly depends on your company policy that how you choose to watermark your images.
Thank you for going through my article. In order to test these plugins feel free to launch your very own cloud based WordPress application at Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed WordPress cloud hosting platform packed with multiple server and application features. Everything is just a click away. If you have any further suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below.
