How to watermark photos online for web and social media
Watermarking may be useful for different reasons. If you run a blog or share some pictures on social media, branding the pictures with a watemark is a good practice to prevent an unwanted use by others. Of course, you may also check if any of your images have been used without your permission.
Now, you only must to create a visual template to automate the watermarking of batches of images efficiently with no effort.
1. Design your watermark
First, we need to create our watermark. A watermark is usually a graphic element with some degree of transparency that we overlay onto an image. It may be a logo, an icon, a text, a shape, or it may consist of any combination of them.
Let's consider three possible watermarks for three different blogs, the cooking blog Spoon, fork, and knife, the ecocamping site Under the sky, and the leisure sailing business Sailing with Robinson. In every case, we'll overlay a transparent logo, a text and a shape to brand the images of each blog.
The logo can be an image or vector graphics that we have designed, bought, or simply found in a free repository. Here I'm using three icons shared by Annalise Batista in Pixabay.
2. Create your visual template
After login to Abraia's console, we go to the editing tool and we upload an example image. Uploaded the image, the first thing is to set the image size. If it means a change of aspect ratio, the smart cropping will guess the best crop. Alternatively, we may select one we have previously uploaded in the navigation tab and then proceed to editing.
Now we can upload our logo or icon and place it to our convenience. Next, we add a text closely related to the blog. If the text is white we may place it over a semitransparent black box. In case it is black we may use a semitransparent white box instead. And so on.
When the design is ready, we just need to save our template as an action to be ready to watermark new images and photos.
3. Watermark multiple photos
Created the template we proceed to the bulk processing tool to configure the watermarked variant which we want to create.
Now we only have to upload the batch of images to watermark. We wait a bit (depending on the number of images uploaded and the variants created) while the images are being processed. And finally, we download all the watermarked images.
We can see how Abraia's smart cropping algorithm works out the best part for each specific image. This is a powerful capability of Abraia's image editing templates.
We can also find a copy of each variant created in the corresponding folder, accesible through the gallery.
4. Configure a local watch folder
Sometimes we want something even more automatic. So we can also configure a local watch folder, which is going to watermark all the updated images in that folder.
You just need to use the Abraia's gulp plugin. Once the plugin is installed, we only need download the configuration from the console (in the left-top corner of the bulk tool), and use it in our setup. Place this JSON file in your configured setup, and start the watcher, it will create the variants with the watermarks defined in the template for any image added to the watched folder.
