Hello friends,

Do you want to protect your uploaded images from theft? There are several ways to do this however one of the most popular ones is to add a watermark to them. This will not prohibit your visitors of downloading them, however the chances to use them on other websites will be highly reduced. The reason for this is because they will be popularizing your website by presenting your watermark and their visitors will know that the image is not genuine. So in other words they will have to be making free advertising for your own WordPress website on one hand and on the other – they will be confessing that they are using stolen images.

So in this post I will be presenting the plugin Image Watermark and its ability to protect your WordPress images.

What exactly is a watermark?

This is some text or image (or both) that is placed on another image. The idea is that the watermark will not prevent the users from seeing the content of the image it protects but it will make it almost impossible to steal it and modify it. The typical watermark is with reduced opacity or almost completely translucent. It is placed either in the center of the image and thus covering almost all of it or is situated in some of the image’s corners.

Another type of watermark is a non-translucent image which replaces some of the protected image’s content and is usually placed in the corners.

Bear in mind that the corner placement of the watermarks reduces the protection as the image can simply be cropped and it will no longer have a watermark. However this type of watermark protection ensures that your visitors will get a good-looking picture. So it’s up to you to decide.

How to use Image Watermark?

Download, install and activate the plugin. Then head to Settings in your WordPress admin panel. There you will get a new menu called Watermark. In it you have to adjust a few settings:

• Select the watermark image that you are going to use;
• Turn off the watermark protection if needed;
• Watermark preview – here you will see the watermark image that you have decided to use;
• Watermark size – define whether to use the original size of the watermark or some scaled or custom sizes. You have to define the latter in pixels for both width and height. The scaling of the watermark (should you choose to use this setting) needs to be defined in percentages;
• Watermark transparency / opacity – here you have to define how translucent will be your watermark. 0% means that it will be completely transparent and 100% means that it will have full opacity;
• Enable or disable watermark;
• Enable the watermark for a specific image size type or for all of them;
• Enable the watermark protection on selected post types only or everywhere on your WordPress website;

After you adjust these settings you have to save them.

Now you have to upload a new image to your WordPress media library. It will be protected with a watermark automatically! As for your previously uploaded images – simply head to the media library and manually apply the watermark to them.

Simple as that!

So what do you think, friends? Will you use Image Watermark for your WordPress websites? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

See you soon, friends!

*The image above is embedded from the WordPress.org page of the plugin.