10 Best WordPress Watermark Plugins

Often, visual artists, photographers and graphic designers create WordPress websites to display their work. A portfolio is important to them to showcase their talent, and the website is a great platform for the same. However, these high-quality, exceptional images and videos aren’t always safe on the internet – there are chances of people stealing and selling them without their permission. That is why it is significant to add watermarks to your content. Fortunately, there are WordPress watermark plugins that do the trick for you. This article would cover some of the best Watermark plugins for your WordPress site. 

What is a Watermark?

Watermarking is the process where an image, text or logo is superimposed on a document or image in order to protect it from being stolen or used without permission. Watermark is a great way to copyright your work so that it is protected from being reused or altered. 

Watermarking is an age-old technique and was traditionally done by wetting the paper – that is the reason why it got the name ‘watermark’. Traditional watermarks were visible only when the paper is held up to the light, or when it is wet. One of the greatest examples of traditional watermarking is the banknote – when you hold it up to the light, you will see a pattern embedded into the paper; that’s nothing but a watermark! 

With the introduction of digital watermarking, things have changed drastically. Digital watermarking can be done using digital tools and seen as translucent lettering or logos on top of an image. Watermarking is a great way to ensure that the image belongs to you and that no one can use it without your permission. 

What are Watermarks for?

As mentioned before, watermarks serve a great purpose – to copyright your images and documents. When you put the images that are solely your brainchild for the public to view, you are surrounded by people who may steal them for their own personal gains. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of people on the internet are unaware of copyright laws and tend to download images that shouldn’t be used without the owner’s permission. Even worse, some are aware and they steal someone else’s work anyway. 

Copyright infringement is a serious problem. If you refer to the Copytrack Global Infringement Report 2019, you will be astonished to know that around 2.5 billion images are stolen daily! This is indeed a huge number and to be honest, watermarking can reduce this issue to a great extent. Well, you can’t stop people from stealing by embedding watermarks on your images, but they will find it difficult to reproduce the replica of your high-quality image with one. 

Apart from copyright, watermarks are a great branding exercise. Haven’t you seen artists leaving their signature under their freshly painted artwork? It helps people identify who the artist is. Similarly, a watermark would tell the world that the work is yours. Even when someone steals it and uses it on their website, people would know who it belongs to, unless they edit and remove the watermark. Place your watermark strategically, and no one can remove it that easily. 

Also read: Stunning Free Stock Photos Websites You Must-Know

Now, let’s dive right into the main topic of discussion – WordPress Watermark plugins that would help you copyright your images. 

1. Easy Watermark

One of the best WordPress watermark plugins available, Easy Watermark allows you to add watermarks automatically to images as and when they are uploaded to the WordPress media library. You can also add watermarks to existing images manually as bulk or even for a single image. Another peculiar feature of this plugin is that you can add texts, images or both as watermarks. This means a single image can have two watermarks of your choice at the same time. 

Key Features: 

• The position and size of the watermark can be controlled.
• Image watermark can be JPEG, PNG or GIF
• Text watermark supports various fonts including Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Tahoma, Times New Roman and Verdana
• Full support for transparency and alpha channel in PNG and GIF files
• JPG and GIF files and text can have opacity set from 0 to 100%
• Text colour, size and rotation can be set
• All built-in image sizes can be watermarked, (including thumbnail, medium, large and full-size) as well as all additional sizes registered by themes or plugins
• Can create image backups and allows for easy restoration of images.
• Can remove the watermark by restoring the original image.

2. Modula Image Gallery

Modula Image Gallery is primarily a customizable WordPress gallery plugin that comes with amazing features. One of its features is to add a watermark to your images. It can hence be considered as a WordPress watermark plugin, however, adding custom watermarks comes only with its premium version. 

Key Features: 

• Set the position and margin for the watermark
• Disable right-click

3. Image Watermark

Another excellent option to add watermark to your images is the Image Watermark plugin. This WordPress Watermark plugin allows you to embed watermark automatically to your images once they are uploaded to the media library. You could preview the watermark image before publishing it with this plugin. You can also select whether you want to apply the watermark or not. This one is absolutely free and can be downloaded and installed with ease. 

Key Features: 

• Choose the position of the watermark image
• Upload custom watermark image
• Set watermark transparency/opacity
• Protect your images from copying via drag & drop
• Disable right mouse click on images
• Image backup functionality
• Option to remove watermark

Also read: Websites To Download Icons For Your Website For Free

4. Product Watermark for WooCommerce

Product Watermark for WooCommerce is a WordPress watermark plugin exclusively for WooCommerce. This plugin allows you to add watermark to product images in your WordPress WooCommerce site with ease. The watermark could be that of a copyright symbol, an image (logo) or text. With a few clicks, you can easily add a watermark to all the product images on your website, making them your own. This is a free plugin, but there is a premium version too, which has additional features. 

Key Features of the Free Version: 

• Custom watermark position
• Watermarks with transparency are supported
• Custom CSS for front end pages

Key Features of the Paid Version: 

• Custom watermark size
•  Different watermarks for different image types
• Save aspect ratio for watermarks
• Up to 5 watermarks
• Place text to images
• Option to set text colour, size and transparency

5. Product Image Watermark for Woo

Another WordPress watermark plugin for WooCommerce, this plugin ensures that you could add watermarks to your downloadable product images effortlessly on your WooCommerce store. The watermarks you use could be copyright symbols, logos or text. You can either add the watermark while uploading the images or on the images that are already in your media library. 

Key Features:

• Repeat the watermark on a single image
• Align a Watermark to a specific position 
• Apply Watermark on any size of an image
• User-friendly admin UI

6. Ultimate Watermark

Another WordPress watermark plugin that allows you to add watermark seamlessly to all the images in your media library is this one – Ultimate watermark. From the house of Mantra Brain, this plugin is a beautiful one where previously uploaded images can also have watermarks without much effort. Additionally, you can control the watermark’s position and size and independently apply them to your media. 

Key Features: 

• Single Image and bulk image watermarking
• Full image backup feature
• Opacity option for Watermark
• Enable/Disable right mouse click on images & image protection features

Also read: Best Sources of Free Illustrations

7. WP Photo Album Plus

This free plugin is more than a gallery plugin – it is a highly customizable multimedia content management and display system. The plugin is absolutely free to use and has some amazing features for your photo albums. One of its greatest features is the availability of watermarking. With WP Photo Album Plus, you can easily watermark your photos in your gallery and save them from theft. 

Key Features: 

• Any number of albums that contain any type of multimedia file as well as sub-albums
• Full control over the display sizes – responsive as well as static
• Full control over links from any type of images

8. Envira Photo Gallery

Envira Photo Gallery is a fast, easy and powerful photo gallery plugin. It has a free and premium version, and the latter comes with watermarking features, making it a WordPress watermark plugin as well. You can protect your images from theft using its excellent watermarking feature and ensure that no one else can use the image without your permission. So, this plugin makes it easy to manage a WordPress gallery, as well as embed a watermark, along with its other features.

Key Features:

• Drag & drop photo gallery builder
• 100% Responsive 
• Mobile friendly

9. Global Gallery

This plugin ensures a searchable, fully responsive, adaptive and filterable gallery for your WordPress site. This is a premium WordPress watermark plugin and comes with a lot of features. The plugin applies watermarks on your images and makes sure that theft of your original images is controlled. 

Key Features: 

• Unlimited image sources
• Four gallery layouts 
• Image tags filter and search
• Image carousel

Also read: Best Instagram Plugins For WordPress

10. Sell Media

If you are a photographer, graphic designer or an artist who wants to sell your work online through your WordPress site, Sell Media is an excellent tool to make things easy. Since you want to display your original work but aren’t sure who would come across it, the chances of theft are high. You could efficiently put a halt to it with the watermark feature that comes along with the plugin. It protects your images and ensures that no one can use them illegally. 

Key Features:

• Create your own stock photo or video site.
• Charge licensing fees for commercial, editorial, or personal usage.
• Accept payments via PayPal and other payment gateways. 

Wrapping Up

Clearly, WordPress watermark plugins are excellent resources to protect your images from theft and re-use. The best feature of all these plugins is that the watermark will automatically be placed on the image without any effort from your side. Hope this article will help you in determining the WordPress watermark plugin that suits your needs.