How to Watermark Images Without Killing Their Quality

A watermark that's easy to remove isn't doing its job, and a watermark heavy enough to be tamper-resistant often ruins the image. The practical middle ground is a semi-transparent mark placed where cropping it out would also crop out the interesting part of the photo — usually a lower third rather than a corner.

Re-compressing an already-compressed JPEG to add a watermark is the most common quality killer. Watermarking should happen on the original, with a single final export, not as a repeated round-trip.

For bulk libraries, non-destructive watermarking — keeping the clean original and generating a marked copy on demand — is worth the extra storage. It's the only way to change your mark later without redoing the entire library.