Tech Tool – How to Protect Your Photos with Watermarks

"I would like to embed a watermark into the photo to avoid copyright issues. Any ideas?"

This was the question that I got from Normajean Gasking at Quamby Falls Lodge earlier in the week.  (Wow – This place definitely needs some investigation.  It looks just like what might be required after a very busy year).

There are a number of ways to place a watermark on photos.  If you have Photoshop, GIMP or any other number of image applications who can easily add what appears to be a watermark by using text that would generally be white (or a light shade of gray) and applying a very light transparency.  This is a manual process and is normally only something you would do for occassional photos.

If you are looking for a way to automate the watermarking process or even apply a watermark across a large batch of photos then I would strongly recommend using an application designed for that purpose.

My recommendation for a cost effective softwatre application that does this batch processing is Watermark Factory - www.watermarkfactory.com.  The program supports batch renaming, resizing and conversion. It also includes other features such as rotating, batch cropping, control over your output size, and a built-in watermark gallery.

They offer a 15-day free download trial and after that it is a very reasonable USD$29.95.  Well worth a try!