Should you watermark your images or not?

This question seems to come up all the time, especially for Etsy shop owners, artists, and crafters, and there is surprising still quite a bit of debate over the issue.

On the one hand, no one wants to pollute their crisp, clean product photos with a tacky watermark.  You want your customers to see every bit of detail and love you poured into your handcrafted items without bashing them over the head with your logo.

BUT....

Do so at your own peril.  It is so easy for your images to either get shared or stolen to the point that no one can trace them back to you and your shop.  

I see this happen all the time on crochet groups that I follow.  Someone finds a gorgeous product on Pinterest or using Google Images and wants to find the pattern, but the link to the original pattern is lost and all that remains is a beautiful image. 

I also had problems with stolen images a few times now (fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...) and I'm finally being more proactive about it.

The first time was with my artwork.  I had read that an alternative to watermarking was using very low resolution images, and didn't want to mar my images, so I tried that approach.  Later I found that prints of it were being sold on Walpart.  So I took down the site and was determined to watermark ALL images of my art from then on.

But I didn't quite learn my lesson.  Last week I did a reverse image search on one of my dog hats only to find this.

That's my product photo of my dog hat, on my dog.  The shop owner downloaded it, put her own watermark on my image, and uploaded it to her shop so that she could sell an imitation product (I haven't ever released the pattern for my hats).

So, to make a long story short, I highly recommend you come up with some sort of watermark for your images.  And in an effort to make that easier for people, I came up with two videos showing how to do this in Picasa.

Picasa is just one of many programs that allow you to watermark images.  I use it for light editing anyway, so I find it convenient.  And PS it is free.

So without further adieu, here is the firs video which shows how to add a very small and basic text-only watermark to your images.  Picasa makes this process very very easy.

But... (again with word "but")

I don't personally like it.  It's small, you can' change the color or shape of your font, and you can't modify the transparency.  Blah.  So I also posted a longer video showing how to create a more elegant looking text-only watermark using Picasa as well.

I hope you find them useful!