Easy Watermarks

As my photography hobby has progressed, I've started to worry about the "safety" of some of my better shots.  Not all of my photos are good enough to be sale-worthy, but I've started experiencing an uptick in local businesses and universities asking me if they can use certain shots for brochures, websites, etc.  I'm generally fine with providing a photo if someone asks for permission (though I have begun to question doing this for free), but I know that there are many people lurking on the internet trying to make use of others' content for profit.

For this reason, I started to seek out quick ways to watermark my favorite shots.  There are several websites out there for this purpose, but the one I'm partial to is Watermark WS or https://www.watermark.ws.

This site allows you to upload a logo or simply use text to protect your photos.  You can also adjust opacity and color (though a logo's color would have to be changed in a different program prior to uploading).  It also (awesomely) allows you to save a watermark as a template, which can be easily applied to photos on subsequent visits to the site.  Finally, you can chose to have a single or tiled watermark depending on your preferences.  Examples of watermarked photos are shown below:

Here is an example of a logo that was uploaded and applied via Watermark WS.

Here is the same logo using the tiled setting.  I can't say I use this setting often, but it's probably the best in terms of protecting your photos.  It's a lot of work for someone to attempt to Photoshop out all of those watermarks.  If they're too lazy to take their own pictures, they're probably too lazy to do that much editing.

Here is a text-only example.  You can see that a copyright symbol has been added.  There are several other copyright/trademark symbols available on the website.

One slight bummer to the free version of this website is that you will only be able to upload one or two photos at a time due to very limited (10 MB) file capacity.  For bulk watermarking, you may want to upgrade your account.  I wanted slightly more storage, but I'm not "big time," so I chose a Plus account for $5/month.  This allows me 250 MB of storage and batches of up to 100 photos.  This is more than enough for my needs.  If you're looking for something to service huge batches of photos and large file sizes, they also have plans that allow up to 5000 MB of storage.  More detailed information on the specifics of each plan is available on the website.

In summary, here's my overall take:

Pros:

-Attractive fonts
-Unlimited color options
-Copyrighting/trademarking symbols
-Opacity controls and tiling options
-Logo upload capabilities
-Ability to save templates for future use
-Signup and basic plans are free
-Next level plan is still cheap $5/month

Cons:

-Free version allows very little file space
-Download batches will expire after approximately a week

As stated before, this is not the only online watermarking site available, but I feel that it's a good one.  Comment with any websites you feel are superior!