WordPress Image watermark plugins are necessary mostly for artists and photographers. There are thousands of artists who use websites for creating their online portfolios. However, often it’s seen that people break copyright laws by downloading and using the pictures and artworks uploaded by the original photographers and artists.
Even if you’re a blogger, there’s a high chance that you’re going to add pictures to your website. Perhaps you’ll work hard to make these pictures suitable for your website page. You may find that other people are using your picture on their website without your permission.
Now that you know the usage of WordPress plugins, now we’ll talk about the best image plugins that you can get now, and we’ll focus more on the free plugins! So, let’s get started, shall we?
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1- Easy Watermark:
This is one of the best watermark plugins that you can get your hands on. If you take a look at the features, you’ll understand why you should prefer it over the other tools and software.
Once you have it installed, you won’t have to do anything else. Once you start uploading pictures on your website, the Easy plugin will keep on applying a watermark to the pictures automatically.
- You can add texts, logos, or even at the same time if you wish to.
- If you want to do it manually, you can do this with every picture at once, or you can do so with one picture at a time.
- You can have two watermarks at once. you can change the size and position. This allows the users to customize in such a way that they protect the picture without ruining its beauty and appeal.
- Easy watermark allows you to add images that are saved in the format of JPG, PNG, or GIF. You’ll also get support for alpha channels and transparency in the case of PNG and GIF files.
- You change the opacity of the JPG and GIF pictures as per your liking, and you can set them from 0% to 100%.
- The text watermarks that you can add to the images are created with TTF fonts. However, the plugin supports only a few fonts. Here, you’ll find some amazing fonts like Arial, Georgia, Tahoma, Verdana, etc. You’ll be able to customize the color, size, and rotation of these fonts.
- Another amazing fact about this plugin is that it can create backups of the images that you upload on your WordPress website. The perk of this is that even if you somehow lose the genuine copy of your photo, then you can restore it from here.
You can add Easy Watermark to your WordPress easily. You need to install and activate this plugin first. Once you’ve activated this plugin, then you need to go to the ‘Settings tab of your website, and then you need to go to the ‘Easy Watermark tab. You’ll find these settings on your WordPress admin panel.
- You’ll get the best performance out of Easy Watermark if you configure it according to the picture provided above.
- Using the Easy Watermark plugin is pretty straightforward. You need to access the image tab right next to the General tab. From here, you can align the image, and fix the opacity, offset, and scale of the image.
- You can also add watermarks to the existing pictures of your website with Easy Watermark very easily. You need to go to the Media section first, and then you must browse the Easy Watermark option. From there, you need to click on the “Add images to all images” button.
- If you click on this button, you’ll see that watermark is added to all the images on your website. Remember that this process isn’t reversible, so you better be sure before clicking on this button.
- Can you restore the original pictures once you’ve added a watermark to all the pictures on your website? Yes, you can. You need to follow a simple process to do this. A lot of people think that deactivating or uninstalling this plugin will remove the watermark, but it doesn’t.
- If you somehow deactivate or uninstall the plugin, you need to reinstall it to remove the watermarks. If you already have it installed on your website, you need to go to the settings tab from the admin panel of WordPress, and then you need to go to the Easy Watermark tab.
Once you’re there, look for the remove button. Clicking that will remove all the watermarks from the pictures on your website.
2- Image Watermark:
If you’re looking for another free WordPress plugin to tag or watermark images, you can go for Image Watermark. Image Watermark is a great alternative to Easy Watermark, and even though they perform the same functions, they’re quite different in many ways.
Image Watermark is extremely easy to use. You can add watermarks to all the pictures that have been uploaded to your website previously, and you can do this with the click of a button.
Then again, this watermark plugin will add watermarks to all the pictures that you’ll upload since you’ve activated this plugin, and it’ll do that automatically.
However, you need to enable the automation beforehand to make it work. You can maintain all of that from the General setting tab.
From here, you can set how you’ll be adding watermarks to the pictures. You can set them to either automatic or to manual. If you set it to automatic, the plugin will do all the jobs for you. If you set it to the manual, on the other hand, you’ll have to add every watermark manually by yourself.
- One important thing to note here is, if you hit the apply button multiple times, you’ll find that all of your pictures have more than one watermark. The more you hit the apply button, the greater the number of watermarks you’ll have on your website.
- You can also select the position in which the watermark will appear. Now, you can choose among nine positions, but we don’t think that this provides enough flexibility as artists and photographers would’ve more benefitted if they could’ve customized the alignment manually.
There are three settings to choose from if you’re talking about the customizability of the watermark itself.
- You can upload the watermark just the way it is, you can customize the watermark when applying it, or you can scale it.
- If you choose the original option, the original size and shape of the watermark will be retained when applying it.
- Then again, if you choose the scaled option, the watermark can be scaled by proportion when applying. Finally, if you want to customize the watermark, you’ll be able to customize the offset according to the X-axis and Y-axis.
One of the best things about Image Watermark is that it allows the user to put certain restrictions on their images. There are three options that you can leverage here.
You can disable right clicks on any image. You can prevent drag and drop of the images, and finally, you can enable this protection for users who have logged into your website as well.
These features are amazing as they prevent all sorts of ways in which a person may download pictures from your website.
- If you enable these, a person won’t be able to download from your website easily. However, we still recommend you apply watermarks to your website, as people might take screenshots of your website, and later extract the picture from there.
- However, it’s a bit discouraging that you can’t remove the watermarks once you’ve applied them to the picture.
- You’ll need to store a backup of the original pictures if you choose to apply a watermark on the images. We highly recommend you back your pictures up before applying a watermark, or you’ll lose your images.
- Now, you can see that Image Watermark isn’t as advanced and flexible as Easy Watermark. Plus, it lacks some of the best features that set Easy Watermark apart from Image Watermark. Even then, it’s one of the most loved and well-received watermark plugins because it’s so easy and simple to use.
If you’re looking for a watermark plugin for WordPress that’s extremely easy to use, then you can go for Image Watermark.
3- WordPress Watermark Plugin CodeCanyon:
If you’re looking for more watermark plugins, then you can go visit CodeCanyon. This website offers tons of free and paid watermark plugins that you can use with WordPress.
However, we highly recommend using the two plugins we mentioned over here. Speaking from experience, you won’t even have to look for another one if you use one of these.
How to Protect Images on Your Website?
Here, we’re going to talk about a few points that’ll allow you to take better care of the pictures on your website.
1- Prevent Right Click:
Most people won’t take the pain of taking a screenshot from your website and then cropping the picture out. What most people will do is they will right-click on the picture they like, and they will tap on ‘Save Image. This is the easiest way of downloading an image from a website, and you can prevent it if you want!
You’ll be able to do this with most watermark plugins. If you’ve got Image Watermark, see the review above to see how you can enable this feature. If you’ve got some other plugin, then you can Google the procedure.
2- Do a Reverse Search:
This isn’t a way of preventing others from taking a picture from your website, but it’s a way of taking your pictures down from someone else’s website. Some people don’t even know that it’s illegal to take pictures of others’ websites.
You can detect who took your picture simply by going to google images and clicking on the camera icon. Once you do that, upload your picture there. Now, Google will search the web for similar images, and you can take them down by asking the website owners.
3- Add DMCA Badge:
DMCA offers free services for taking down infringements. If you add such a badge to your website, you might be able to scare people who intended to steal from your website. If someone does take a picture from you, DMCA will help you take that website down.
How to Protect Photos with Watermark Plugin?
If you apply a watermark to the photos on your WordPress website, that doesn’t mean that people won’t be able to use them anymore. People will still be able to download and use your photos.
However, if you have it applied to the photos, it’ll be visible that the source of that particular photo is your site, and people will know what to look for should they find that picture attractive or helpful.
See also:
5 Easy Ways To Add a WP Background Image
WordPress Backgrounds Images
WordPress Featured Image Size
Conclusion:
As you can see, adding a watermark to your website’s pictures is very important. You can use WordPress to create the watermark plugins we mentioned earlier to do this job. Plus, make sure you secure your website by following the extra tips we provided!
