Best watermarking software?

Photoshop would be able to do it. Not sure if its worth that much to you though

Gimp does this, and it's freeware.

Edit: Pixelator does too, but it seems like it's easier to do in Gimp imo.

zincsulfate said:

GIMP? I never heard of it before.

Click to expand...

It's basically photoshop-lite. It's definitely handy though.

Adobe Lightroom has this functionality build in, maybe it is worth to check it out.

Not an expert on this, but AFAIK, a good watermark can be encoded invisibly into an image. And, with the best ones, you can retrieve the watermark even after the image has been substantially re-processed by a thief.

See this Wikipedia article.

Any decent image editor will of course do this, but it's not likely to be time-efficient without a bit of setup (recording actions). Pixelmator and Acorn can both do this, and I believe they will also both install an automator action in your system, so that you can make a workflow or application to do it with drag/drop, and/or in batches.

Someone wrote a free watermarking automator action, available in this thread:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1776011/

The action *is* quite old, but I just tested it under 10.9.5 and it works fine.

You might spend a few minutes figuring out how to create automator apps (I'm sure there are numerous youtube tutorials), but you only need to do it once, and then you'll have a free one-click solution.

I've seen a few dedicated watermarking applications, but none of them have really impressed me. My preferred tool is Lightroom, but that's waaay overkill for the task.

PokerGuy said:

Yes I think that would be going overboard as I don't need any other features that photoshop would offer - just need good watermarking options.

Click to expand...

You can add watermarking as part of the code that builds the pages to display images. There are tons of tricks to make copying a photo more difficult. Some quick and simple ones: disable right click, full screen watermark layered over the top of the image, that way a copy actually copies only the watermark and not the image underneath. All of this is easily bypassed by someone determined enough. Lastly use the lowest quality images you can get away with online.

Back in the day, I used a PS script to add watermarks to 1000's of images at once. It would run through every image in the folder and add a watermark to it.

Not sure how relevant this is now, but a quick search found:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1477413