Image theft is real. Original photos are being constantly misused or stolen by internet users who display total disregard for other people’s hard work. Fortunately there are a couple of ways you can try to protect your photos, and one of them is watermarking.
By adding a watermark to your images you reduce the risk of having your authentic photography stolen, because this way you claim ownership of those images. Therefore anyone who uses them without your prior authorization has to face the consequences. Besides protecting your intellectual property, a watermark can also be viewed as a powerful marketing tool. If a picture with your logo goes viral, it should reroute some traffic back to your website and help you increase your online visibility.
As a Mac user, you’ve got at your disposal plenty of specially-built apps to watermark photos. Of course, you could also resort to an all-round software like Photoshop, but it comes at a higher cost and with a steep learning curve. In this article we’ve listed 10 Mac apps which are affordable and allow you to watermark your pictures with ease.
PhotoMarks
PhotoMarks is our first proposal to protect your photos on Mac. The app comes with an intuitive interface which makes it easy to use and offers the possibility to watermark multiple images at once. All you have to do is add your images, create your watermark and the app will automatically apply it to all the selected photos.
With PhotoMarks you’re at liberty to add any type of text mark (EXIF/IPTC metadata, company name, website, copyright), as well as a logo or mask. No matter what you choose, you can fully customize the appearance of your watermark: you get to adjust the position, size and rotation, change the opacity, select from a wide range of fonts and colors, use tiling or apply special effects such as stroke and shadow or draw a bounding-box. Live preview is available for every edit you make.
To help you save time and effort, PhotoMarks comes with a productivity-boosting feature that allows you to save your settings as Profiles and load them in future sessions without having to perform the same operations. Besides watermarking, you can optimize your images by resizing, cropping, rotating or converting them from and to multiple formats (the app provides support for popular RAW formats). You can also decorate your pics with various frames and borders.
If you want to watermark photos on the go, the app also has a version for iPhone, which is available on the App Store.
iWatermark Pro
iWatermark Pro is a batch processing app created to protect your visual content. Its appeal resides in the fact that it can provide users with a large variety of watermarks. To secure or brand your photos you can resort to various forms of text, to logos, vector borders, QR codes or your own signature. These are all visible marks, but with this Mac app you can also insert a StegoMark. This is an invisible watermark which enables you to embed personal information such as your name or website into the image data itself.
Once you’ve created your watermark, you can edit it to match your standards. You can place it where you want, scale and rotate it to the preferred angle, adjust the transparency, select the desired font and color or apply special effects like aqua, emboss or shadow. You can further edit your pics by resizing them or by stylizing them with various filters and effects. Although it comes packed with numerous and useful features, the app doesn’t come with the most thrilling design. On the contrary, the interface is rather cluttered and takes a while getting used to it.
PhotoBulk
PhotoBulk is a batch image editor for Mac that enables you to protect your pictures prior to publishing them online. The app has a modern interface, with a live-preview feature, and therefore it’s pretty simple to use. You can add both text and graphics such as a company logo, as well as scripts, which are editable text tags designed to cover the entire photo.
PhotoBulk lets you gain control over your watermarks by selecting the desired placement, rotation angle, setting the opacity or changing the fonts and colors. Unfortunately you can’t apply special effects like stroke and shadow to your text mark, only underline it. Other features include the possibility to bulk rename, resize, optimize or convert your images. To increase your productivity you have the option of saving your commonly-used settings as presets and using them later.
Watermark Plus
Watermark Plus stands out from the crowd by offering 17 built-in watermark profiles, to make your task easier. At the same time it gives you the chance to save your own design profiles and load them later. The app has a simple, easy-to-understand interface and comes with two modes to watermark photos: batch and single. Depending on your needs, you can insert text and image marks, as well as scripts for increased protection.
All the watermarks are customizable. This means you can freely modify the position, size or rotation, adjust the layer and opacity, choose your own text style or add special effects such as glow or stroke. Besides protecting images from being stolen, Watermark Plus can also be used to rename photos, reduce their file size or convert them in bulk.
CF/X Watermark Pro
If you want to protect your intellectual property or promote your brand online, Watermark Pro from CF/X is definitely worth trying. This app enables you to add various types of watermarks to your pictures in bulk: text (from your website to metadata information), logo, maps or QR codes with up to 4.000 characters.
Watermark Pro lets you take over and fine-tune your watermarks as you want. For that purpose you can freely resize, rotate and position them, set the transparency and the blend mode, select the font style, color or size and more. To be more efficient in your post-processing there’s the option to save your watermark designs and easily apply them later to another group of photos. Other editing options include resizing or converting images to common formats.
PhotoMill
PhotoMill is an useful Mac utility that offers plenty of features to optimize your pictures. The app allows you to insert both text and logo marks into your photos and customize them in different ways: you can adjust their size, position and rotation, apply effects like stroke and shadow and even a tiling mode. If you’re dealing with multiple pictures, you can effectively batch watermark them.
In addition to watermarking, PhotoMill has other useful features to help you improve your images. The app places at your disposal options to edit metadata, rename and resize your files, convert photos to other formats and color models, as well as retouch pictures by adjusting the contrast, white balance, exposure or sharpness. You can also use PhotoMill as a photo browser, since it offers multiple features to browse and search by diverse criteria.
Watermark Sense
Watermark Sense gives you the possibility to protect your visual content in a quick and simple manner. With live preview for every step of the process, the app enables you to add text and image marks in batch mode and fine-tune them as you wish. For that purpose you get to manage their placement, rotation or scale, change the transparency, select a blending mode and apply other visual effects.
With Watermark Sense you don’t have to repeat the same edits over and over again. The app lets you save your watermark settings as presets and quickly load them in another session for faster editing. Additionally you can rename, rotate or flip multiple photos at once. The app also integrates with its sister-utility Resize Sense in order to batch resize and crop images.
maWatermarker
maWatermarker is a simple Mac program created to ensure image protection. This batch processing app has a user-oriented interface and gives you the possibility to watermark your photos in various ways. You can insert EXIF metadata, various types of text, as well as graphics such as a logo or perhaps copyright symbol.
With maWatermarker you can edit your watermark to suit your needs. There are options to reduce its size, adjust its position and rotation, change the opacity, select the font type, size and color, as well as apply diverse filters to the image watermark. To save time and energy you can save your settings as presets and use them in another session.
Star Watermark
Star Watermark is an easy-to-use app designed to help users protect image files. The interface is pretty straightforward, allowing you to quickly understand how everything works. The app comes with batch processing capabilities and lets you create your own watermark templates which you can customize to your liking.
You can adjust your watermark by rotating it, setting the transparency to blend with the image, stylizing the font or dropping a shadow for an improved look. You can also select where you want to place your watermark, but the downside is that you can’t do it freely using drag and drop: you have to choose from a series of predefined positions. In fact, Star Watermark doesn’t abound in features, offering little possibilities to optimize and retouch your photos.
Retrobatch
Retrobatch is a powerful node-based batch photo editor for Mac. This means you have the opportunity to combine multiple operations and develop customized workflows that automatically edit your pictures. Naturally, the app places at your disposal the option to watermark your photos by using text and/or logo marks. You can customize them by changing the placement, blending mode, transparency and more.
What else can you do with Retrobatch? Well, you can perform lots of operations to optimize your images for web use. You can edit and add metadata, convert photos to other color profiles and formats, resize, crop, trim or rotate them. To further enhance your pictures you can apply artistic filters and effects such as fade, noir or sepia, sharpen and reduce the noise or add borders.