Watermarks. What are they? Do you need them? And Where to find one that makes life simple…

What is a watermark?

On the World Wide Web a watermark is basically a label, so to speak. It is digitally imprinted onto a photo, logo, design, etc; Allowing the creator to establish his or her copyright signature onto their creative work. Most often you find these within online images. Owners use these watermarks to prevent the online community from using their work without recognition. 

Photo without Watermark:

Photo with Watermark:

Why should web-masters use them? 

I am what most would call an amateur photographer. I LOVE taking photos, it's honestly a little ridiculous and I think I may even annoy my friends on our many outings. However, often these are the photos I use for outdoor adventure blogs, web articles and informational documentation online. 

Sometimes I am totally down to share the love but often I spend quality time editing my photos and they mean a lot to me. Plus I typically worked hard for certain shots, hiking, snowboarding or swimming to specific locations, like the one pictured in this post. So how do I protect those photos form people swooping them up in a Google image search or directly for my site? I got a sweet watermarking plug-in for my images after trying out the time consuming old school way. I'm will quickly introduce you to both methods. 

Note: If a photo lives on a decently ranked page for a specific keyword there's an even better chance your images will come up during a relevant image search. It also means your doing good work in the SEO department! 

Options available for watermarking. 

You can do what I was doing for quite some time and manually edit your photos using photoshop or any other photo editing software but this can take up a lot of time. In the end I often just went about posting without watermarking, and found my images on other people sites with no recognition. I really don't mind if anyone uses my images, just give me the street cred after everything is said and done.  

So what's the solution?? I highly recommend a watermark plug in. Quality plug-ins allow you to very simply watermark your photos in each post, article, or page you create on your website. It's done with a simple html tag in your code. The tag is basically a plugin. It can communicate with the code of your page, identify any image files and quickly watermark it with your signature. 

Trinitronic offers an easy to use and highly useful watermarking plug-in, identical to what I described above. The Nice Watermark plugin is a simple tag you can add to your html code in the text editor for effective and efficient copyright labeling. What could be better?! 

Happy Watermarking!