Photographers who post their photos online are frequently concerned about people using their photos without permission or claiming ownership of their photos. One way to lessen the risks is to watermark your photos before posting them. A watermark is a way to putting your name/copyright information directly into your photo.

We’ve recently found a couple of handy little programs for Windows XP and Vista that make it easy to watermark your photos. uMarkLite and uMark Professional are made by Uconomix and can be downloaded from their website. Both versions were easy to download, install and run.

uMark Professional allows you to place a custom watermark in any location on a photo. You can also tile the watermark so it appears repeatedly on your photo. It allows you to process an unlimited number of photos at a time, and can handle five types of files (jpg, tiff, png, bmp, and gif). You can download a 15 day trial version of uMark Professional and then purchase it if you like it for $ 19.99.

Here are a few screen shots from uMark Professional which shows how easy it is to use:

Choose your photos to watermark

Create and place your watermark

Determine where the watermarked photos will be saved

The watermarked photo

uMark Lite is available for free. It has fewer features than the Professional version. It only handles three file types of files, limits you to processing 50 files at a time, and only allows places the watermark in one of 9 preset positions. You choose what the watermark to read, and where it is placed on your photo. There is a small uMark Lite logo placed on files created using the Lite version.

uMark is a great utility program for photographers. If you do download it and find it useful, we’d recommend getting the professional version. For $ 20, you get many more features, and won’t have the logo from the free version on your photos. You’ll also be supporting a company that created the program.

We’d like to thank Tinu Abayomi-Paul of the Increase Your Website Traffic blog for the heads up on the uMark software.