Put real effort into your product photography and you'll eventually find a competitor using your shots. A watermark is the simplest deterrent: it brands every image as yours and makes stolen copies obvious and far less useful.
When to watermark (and when not to)
- Your own store, social, lookbooks, supplier-facing images — yes, watermark away.
- Amazon/eBay/Etsy main listing images — no. Marketplaces forbid text, logos and watermarks on the main image, and it'll get suppressed. Watermark the photos you publish elsewhere; keep marketplace main images clean (use SpecShot for those).
Text vs. logo
- Text (e.g. "© Your Store") — fast, no asset needed, pick a font and color.
- Logo — upload your brand mark (a transparent PNG works best) for a more professional look.
Both are in the Watermark tool.
Placement that actually protects
A watermark tucked in one corner is trivially cropped out. To genuinely deter theft:
- Use the repeated/diagonal pattern (the default) — tiled across the whole image, it can't be cropped away without destroying the photo.
- Keep opacity moderate (~30–50%) — visible enough to deter, light enough to still show the product.
- Size it sensibly — large enough to read, not so large it hides what you're selling.
It's a balance: a faint corner mark looks clean but protects little; a heavy tiled mark protects well but is intrusive. For images you're worried about, lean toward the tiled pattern.
Do it in bulk
Selling a catalog? Drag in a whole folder and watermark every image at once with the same settings, then download them together.
A watermark deters casual theft and reuse — it's not DRM. For truly sensitive images, also keep the originals and only publish watermarked versions.