The Rundown on Picture Watermarking

Browsing through personal websites of your friends who are into digital photography, do you notice some of their pictures to have watermarks? Picture watermarking has definitely become a trend amongst the many aspiring digital photographers all over the Internet today. However, this is not just because this is a fashion trend or a trend of mere convenience, so to speak. Many people think that people are just joining the band here because having watermarked images have certainly become trendy enough. Beyond the obvious catch-on trend here, having watermarks on images is actually a security precaution.

You just do not know what visitors have in mind when they save your pictures off your website. Cyberstalking, after all, is becoming more and more rampant all over the web. In the many social networking sites all over the Internet, you surely must have heard of a friend or two complaining about accounts or websites bearing their very faces, with the owners of these sites claiming to be them. Most of the time, these accounts would actually be in the form of smear campaigns, and this is not something you would want to experience yourself. Thus, there is a definite need to place watermarks all over your pictures so that cyberstalkers and such would be discouraged from using your pictures without your permission.

Apart from the personal perspective, there is also the business perspective. Let us say that you operate an online store and you sell all sorts of gadgets - mobile phones, computers, laptops, digital cameras, the works. Naturally, you will be posting pictures of the products that you are trying to sell. This would be the obvious thing to do because you are operating an online store, after all. How else would your customers know what you are selling, right?

Still, there are many people who would drop by your website just to browse through the pictures of your products and they would remain mere visitors. Good for you if that is all they do - browse. There are some, however, who would go the extra mile and download all the pictures you have posted for whatever purpose they deem. But if you watermark your images, then these would also be protected from unauthorized use.

So, how do you go about it? The first step here is to find photo watermarking software to use. There are many applications that you can easily download from the web so be on the lookout for the ones that have the features you need the most. Once you have chosen your software, you can then choose what type of watermark to use. There are several kinds - generic, specific, date, copyright, and image. The first four pertain to the use of text for your watermark. Generic, as suggested by its name, could be in the form of DEMO or SAMPLE. Specific could be in the form of your name or the name of your store. As for date watermarks, the date when the pictures were taken would be the watermarks used. Copyright watermarks would have COPYRIGHT all over the picture, while image watermarks could be your company logo printed all over.

Now that you know the basics on picture watermarking, you can begin experimenting on which particular watermark to use already.