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.

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). 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/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!

After images are reprocessed with a new watermark, old versions of the images (e.g. with the old watermark) might still be cached, beside in your own browser, also by ISPs and other network caches that are out of both your control and PhotoDeck’s. These caches might take several weeks to clear and you might not see the new watermark on some images during that time.

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.