Prevent Image Theft with Watermark My Image Plugin in WordPress

Watermark My Image is distinct to other watermark plugins as it adds text watermark underneath the images uploaded. The text watermark though being simple, is highly customizable. You can enable watermark for different image sizes, customize height and background color of the watermark and set font properties in easy manner through the settings page. For the plugin to work properly, GD extension for PHP, FreeType Library and DOM (for generating watermarks for already uploaded images) needs to be installed in the server. This article presents steps to prevent image theft with Watermark My Image plugin in WordPress.

Prevent Image Theft with Watermark My Image Plugin in WordPress

Step 1: Plugin Installation

Go to Plugins > Add New. Type keyword “watermark my image”. Then click on the “Install Now” button.

Then click on “Activate Plugin” button to activate it.

Step 2: Adjusting the settings

After plugin activation, a new menu tab appears with heading Watermark My Image. The tab consists of two sub navigation items: Configuration & Apply Watermark. Click on the first sub navigation item “Configuration” to adjust default settings of the plugin.

The configuration page of the plugin includes various features that can be easily configured or updated.

The configuration settings page has a preview option through which you can see the text watermark before its actual implementation. You can enable watermark for different sizes of uploaded images like medium, large, full size and custom size. There is also an option for placing watermark inside image. When this option is selected, the watermark is placed inside the image. You can set height and background color of watermark accordingly. Next options include setting up of offset, spacing, alignment of text, and jpeg quality. Offset can be set in both dimensions with unique values.

Through the settings page, you can customize two texts independently. For both the texts, different values can be given and font face, size and color can be specified uniquely to each other.

Now, second sub navigation item is “Apply Watermark”. Using this setting, you can apply watermark to old images that were already uploaded to the website before the plugin installed. In this page, you can update cron settings of WordPress platform. WordPress cron is a feature that handles processes like email, backups or scheduled posts to occur at certain defined intervals. First of all, he/she can use WordPress cron or choose not to use this service. WordPress cron interval can be set there and images per batch can be defined. This will automatically watermark older images as per the updated settings.

Also Read: Essential WordPress Settings You Must Consider after WordPress Setup

There are some extra notes of the plugin that should be taken care of. They can be listed out as:

If a user wants to use own custom fonts, he can do so by uploading fonts to the folder /wp-content/plugins/watermark-my-image/fonts.
If wp-watermark.php exists in the folder /wp-content/plugins/watermark-my-image/, user should rename it to watermark-my-image.php.
It is advised to have full backup of website before implementing watermark on the images as the watermarking process is irreversible.
If older images are being watermarked using attachment id, the attachment id can be found by accessing the folder com/wp-admin/upload.php and hovering over the images. The ids are the numbers seen right after the attachment_id parameter.

You can also view other watermark plugins available for WordPress sites.

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Dhiraj Bikram Khadka

Dhiraj Bikram Khadka is a Freelance Technical Writer cum WordPress Developer. He has been working in this area since 2006 AD. As a Web/WordPress Developer, he works on HTML/DHTML, CSS, PHP/MySql, javascript, jQuery, AJAX and more... Having a degree of M.E. (Information Systems Engineering), he is more interested towards contemporary developments in golbal technical arena. His hobbies include reading articles about Theoretical Physics, travelling and making friends. He is currently working as techinical writer for mustbeweb.com.