Last Updated on September 22, 2023 by Christopher G Mendla
As I started to resurrect my blogs, I realized that I was posting images without a watermark. The sad fact is that people can and will steal the result of your effort and use it as their own for their own profit.
One simple technique is to watermark your images. This involves putting text or an image on your image. There are a couple of ways to do this.
UPDATE December 2019 – I have switched from manually watermarking images with GIMP to using a WordPress watermarking plugin The plugin automates the watermarking process.
- Online sites that will add a watermark. This could work but if the site is free I have to wonder what happens when my images are uploaded for processing. There probably is no problem but you don’t really know.
- Manually adding a watermark via an image editor such as Photoshop or Gimp. This is extremely time consuming.
- Use a stand alone program to add watermarks. This was a possibility.
- Add a script to GIMP to handle watermarking.
I settled on option 4. GIMP is an open source image processing program. Some advantages over Photoshop and nice features are:
- It is free
- It is free
- I can run it under Ubuntu or Windows
- It is free.
One downside of GIMP is that I think that the learning curve is a little steeper than for Photoshop.
I was doing some cropping and using the autofix tool of the Windows 10 image editor. I decided to go to the GIMP tool because the photo editing features are a couple of orders of magnitude more powerful than the Windows tool . I can open an image, crop it, clean it up and watermark it all in one step. Note that most of the images I’m dealing with are images that I took.
I found a Gimp Plugin at http://registry.gimp.org/node/6703?destination=node/6703. You need to install it and start GIMP. I had a couple of issues. It seems that as December 2017, the GIMP Plugin pages are static only. In other words, there is no way to post questions or reply to questions.
To install the script
- Shut down GIMP. I’m not sure if it will pick up the script if it is already running
- Go to http://registry.gimp.org/node/6703?destination=node/6703
- Install the script in the proper folder. For example, if you are running the 64 bit Windows version, install it in C:Program FilesGIMP 2sharegimp2.0scripts. Note that since it is an SCM script, it gets installed in the sharegimpscripts folder.
- Start Gimp
- Open an image.
- Choose Script-Fu-myscripts-watermark from the menu.
- NOTE – There is a post on the page saying the person could not get the watermark tool to work. I ran into the same issue. It turns out that the dialog box for Watermark was buried on my desktop. If you don’t see it, try Alt-tabbing through your windows.
- Set the watermark the way you want.
- Export the file to the format/folder you want. I created a folder called /watermarked, but figure out what works for you.
There are batch scripts available but I figure I will probably be opening the images for editing anyway so this works for me.
NOTE – If you put the watermark in a corner, a persistent thief can copy your image and crop or even edit out the watermark. However, most thieves are probably not going to exert that amount of effort.
This is a portion of a photo that I want to watermark.
With the script installed, I can navigate to Script-Fu – MyScripts – Watermark
The Dialog box is shown below.
With the settings above, the results are as follows. Again, keep in mind that this is just a portion of the whole photo. You can make the watermark more or less prominent by changing the settings.
