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.

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.

Behind the scenes, it is also used when generating missing preview formats for use on your website (for example in some cases when you change the size of the displayed images in the Gallery Display Style settings).

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).

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.

Applying a new/updated watermark to previously uploaded images

To apply a new watermark, the preview images must be regenerated. If needed, a watermark can be applied to all your images at once:

1. Prepare your new watermark, and test it by uploading multiple images, on light and dark textured backgrounds.
2. Make sure the watermark is set as default.
3. Contact support to ask to have all your images reprocessed, and confirming that you have performed the first 2 steps. This is a computer-intensive operation that might take time depending on the number of images in your media library.
4. When the preview images are regenerated, clear your browser cache to refresh the images it displays!