How to Protect your Food Blog Pictures

To create and maintain a successful food blog requires the presence of a truly versatile person. To thrivingly rise to the challenge you need to display multiple skills, since your journey will involve coming up with creative recipes, cooking in style, taking photos in proper lighting conditions and suitably editing them and marketing your blog posts for exposure.

Editing food photos is an essential part of the process, since we all know the impact a high-quality photo can have on an audience. In addition to typical, slight corrections like adjusting the contrast or the colors, one key aspect revolves around watermarking your images.

Should you or shouldn’t you add a watermark to your pictures? Some food bloggers do it, others don’t and, after all, it’s understandable. This is part of human diversity and where one foresees nothing but benefits another may anticipate a lot of drawbacks.

In order to get a clear picture, it’s best to just draw out a list of the pros and cons of adding watermarks.

3 Reasons to Watermark Blog Photos

Here’s why it’s advisable to use watermarks:

1. Protect your images from being stolen and used on other websites, food blogs, social networks or printed advertisements like flyers, brochures or restaurant menus.
2. By inserting either a logo or text watermark you can give your food photography a more professional look.
3. This is a great way to advertise your work, to get some online exposure and drive traffic to your blog.

3 Reasons Against Watermarking

1. It’s not foolproof – with the right skills and the right photo editing software, a watermark can be easily cropped out.
2. It can cause distraction from the original image –  a centrally-located watermark is considerably more difficult to remove, but at the same time it will definitely turn the focus away from the picture.
3. Well-known, reputable companies will not steal your pictures. If they wish to use them for commercial reasons, they will most likely get in touch with you first.

What Software to Use

In case you opt to watermark your photos, it’s important to know you can find a wide range of photo editing software to help you through the process. On the one hand, you could use an all-round, complex tool like Photoshop. On the other hand, you can try a software developed to serve exactly this purpose.

Some refuse to watermark their pictures because they claim it’s a time-consuming task and that they could use the time required for this operation to focus on other projects. Well, with a tool like PhotoMarks you don’t really have to worry about wasting time because the software is designed to watermark images in bulk, making sure dozens or hundreds of photos get processed within minutes.

Of course, you can do the same with Photoshop. But the process will take longer, since you have to record a new action, save it and next apply that action to your group of photos. Instead using PhotoMarks is significantly easier and involves a three-step wizard: add your photos, apply the watermark and select your destination folder.

This photo watermark app works on both desktop and mobile devices and comes with an intuitive, user-friendly interface, so that it will be easy to use regardless of your previous photo editing experience. You can add both text and logo watermarks and completely customize them to suit your needs. For that purpose you have the option to choose the exact positioning, the tile mode and rotation or add special effects like shadow, stroke or bounding box.

PhotoMarks is all about productivity and therefore allows users to save their current settings as profiles and easily use them again later. In addition to watermarking, the app can perform other useful edits for bloggers such as resizing or converting images to a large variety of formats.

What Aspects to Consider

If at the end of the day you decide it’s best to protect your photos by watermarking them, here are a couple of tips to consider:

• Make it professional-looking

Take your time and analyze whether a logo or perhaps a text watermark would suit you better. If designing a logo seems too much of a hassle, opt for a text mark. You can use your own name, your blog’s name or your blog’s URL. Just make sure to find a crisp, professional-looking font.

• Find the right size

Like always, size matters. A huge watermark will most surely do you more wrong than good, while a really small one will become basically unreadable. Play around with the size until you find the right proportions.

• Place it discreetly

Deciding where you position your watermark on the image is essential. The classic approach implies placing it in the lower right corner so it doesn’t divert attention from the photo. Also don’t forget to lower the opacity to the right level in order to remain as subtle as possible.