Customizing and changing watermarks

A watermark is the only real protection against image theft and screen captures.

Watermarks and their settings are accessible via the Upload window. You can use multiple watermarks, and choose for each upload what watermark should be applied.

Watermarks are embedded directly into the previews

To offer a robust protection, watermarks are embedded directly into the preview images (or videos) displayed on your website. The watermark is therefore applied upon initial upload.

Watermarks don’t know about galleries: if an image or video is present in multiple galleries, the same watermark will be visible in all the galleries.

Watermarks are not applied to delivered files or files sent to labs for printing

Watermarks are only applied to the previews on your website, and therefore no watermark should be visible on the images delivered to your clients or sent to labs for printing. The only exception is the 1-click low-res download, which offers for download a preview image.

If you see a watermark in images delivered to clients or sent to a lab, it is most likely that you accidentally uploaded an image with an embedded watermark (for example by applying a watermark in Lightroom as part of the upload process). You can check the uploaded file by downloading it from your account.

Changing the default watermark

The default watermark is used when importing images through FTP, Lightroom and Photo Mechanics. It is preselected when opening the upload window.

To change the default watermark, open the watermark in the image upload window, and click on the Use as default watermark checkbox.

Customizing your watermark

You can either use the tools provided by PhotoDeck to create and customize a text watermark, or for best branding and flexibility (depending on your subscription level), use your own watermark image.

If you use your own watermark image, for best results use a PNG format with transparent background, and upload it in a large size (500 to 2000 pixels wide depending on how wide the watermark will be displayed). The watermark image must be under 3 Mpixels and its file size under 1 Mo, otherwise the import with message “invalid file format”.

My watermark appears cropped (or doesn’t appear) on my images!

The gallery display styles include an option to automatically crop preview images so that they appear bigger on the screen, especially for the Portfolio styles (for example for a full-bleed effect).

Depending on the purpose of the gallery in question, you can either reduce the amount of cropping allowed (via the corresponding gallery style settings) and keep the watermark (recommended for client and ecommerce galleries), or not use a watermark (recommended for Portfolio galleries). Alternatively, you can also center your watermark on the image.

My watermark does not appear on all images!

Please make sure your watermark of choice is set as “watermark by default” in its settings. This way, you won’t have to remember selecting it each time you upload new images, or when uploading from Lightroom, for example.

Applying a new/different watermark to previously uploaded images

Changing watermark on existing images requires the images to be re-uploaded, using the Replace feature to keep their metadata, pricing, etc…

• If your files have unique file names and they have not changed, you can easily re-upload many files at once using the Replace option in the upload window.
• If the images where uploaded via Lightroom’s PhotoDeck publish plugin, set the new watermark as “default watermark” in PhotoDeck, open the plugin’s settings to re-upload also the images files on update (don’t forget to disable it when you’re done), then republish the files from Lightroom.

Please note that when a file is replaced, a version number is added to its file name.

Right-click protection of images

Right-clicking on images is disabled in the galleries (and not on content added through the free editor), but it is mostly a small inconvenience for people wanting to grab an image from your site. For example, a screenshot is an effective and easy alternative, and slightly more sophisticated users can easily access the files of the preview images displayed on the site. An opaque watermark is the best protection.