David Leong

HOW TO: Batch Watermark Photos in Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop’s built-in automate function makes batchmarking photos a lot easier. If you happen to upload a lot of photos to the internet, follow the guide below to protect them from being stolen without due credit.

To begin, select one of your favorite photograph (make sure you save a copy of it before playing around with it)

1. Open the photo you wish to work with in Adobe Photoshop.

2. Click Window -> Actions or press ALT + F9 to bring up the actions window.

3. Click on the Actions tab on the actions window and select new action. The new action button is the second button from the right.

4. The new action window will appear.

5. The new action window will prompt you for a name, the set the action is under, the function key of the action and its color. Choose a descriptive name for your action.  The function key acts like a keyboard shortcut key for your action. For our purposes, we will just set it to none.

6. Press Record. You will notice that the record button turns red.

7. The watermark can be created once Adobe Photoshop starts recording the new action. Create a new layer and use the tools (Window -> tools ) window to make your watermark. I colored my watermark text to gray as gray is both visible in dark and bright colors.

8. When you’re all done, click on Layer -> Flatten image.  This will merge the two or more layers into an image so that it can be saved.

9. (THIS STEP IS OPTIONAL) Press File -> File Info and fill in your copyright information. Try to make this part as general as possible as it will be applied to all images when you automate the batch watermark process.

10. Click the stop button in the actions window when you are all set.

11. To automate the batch watermark process, click on File -> Automate -> Batch

12. Put all the images that you would like to watermark in a folder (It will be a good idea to backup these images first). Select the action that you would like, in this case Watermark. It is also good to check the Suppress File Open Options Dialogs and Suppress Color Profile Warnings boxes as they might disrupt the batch process.

13. You can also create a new action to batch watermark photos that are oriented vertically.

Enjoy!