So I run a blog with many contributing authors, and rather than have each of my authors have to watermark product review pics before they upload to WordPress, I wanted to see if I can save some time and have my site do the watermarking automatically as images were uploaded.
Well, after testing a few plugins I found that Image Watermark which is free for WordPress gets the job done and is a fantastic plugin.
All you do is search for and install Image Watermark in the WordPress Plugin Gallery. https://wordpress.org/plugins/image-watermark/
After you activate the plugin, simply go into Settings > Watermark to start configuring it.
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Once you are in the Image Watermark settings you configure the settings you want which include enabling auto watermarking, manual watermarking images in the media gallery, watermarking specific image sizes (but not thumbnails for example).
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You can also enable front end image uploading as well as deactivate all database settings on plugin deactivation. You choose where to place the watermark on your image.
Then you upload the image and choose the size, manual scaling, and transparency which you will have to play around with to get the right transparency you are looking for to where it is clearly visible but doesn’t distract or block too much of the image you are watermarking. For me about 30% was right.
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It also gives you the ability to protect your images by disabling right click and drag and drop functionality if you need it to as well.
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Now when you write an article in WordPress and you use the WordPress Add Media button and manually select an image to upload, it will automatically apply the watermark immediately.
This does cause a delay when uploading images, it will take quite a bit longer while you wait for the image to upload and be able to insert into post, but you can see the watermarked image immediately.
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You can see from this test below, I don’t have enough transparency set for this image, the watermark is too visible.
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Tweaking it a little bit by making it more transparent and moving it to top right corner. You can see it is a little more transparent, but still a bit too visible.
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One more try this time changing the scale slider as well, and this is just about right, though I could even make it more transparent and smaller and move it somewhere else too. The trick is to figure out what works best as default, since you don’t want to have to go into the setting each and everytime you upload an image.
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Image Watermark was not compatible with Onepress Image Elevator off-hand when copying/pasting images from the clipboard but it haven’t tried front end loading yet. But by and far it is a fantastic plugin for automatically adding watermarks to images that you upload to your WordPress site and the flexibility with the watermark is incredible. This is ideal for multi-author sites where you aren’t the one always responsible for uploading media and need to make sure all your images are watermarked.
This is an original article from WP Cypher Copyright 2012
