Quick start

First time in WordPress? Open Your WordPress admin in another tab — it maps every Watermark menu item to the matching docs page.

This walkthrough takes about 5–10 minutes and ends with watermarked images on your site.

1. Open the watermark builder

Open Watermark → Add Watermark.

You'll see a form with three tabs:

• Basic — name, type (text or image), enable / disable.
• Appearance — content (text content or image), position, size, opacity.
• Rules — when this watermark applies (post type, image size, conditions).

Plus a Display tab on Pro-active installs (controls on-the-fly frontend rendering).

2. Pick a type — text or image

Text watermark

Use case: copyright text, your studio name, a website URL stamp.

In Basic → Type, select Text. The Appearance tab now shows:

Field	What it is
Watermark text	Multi-line text. Supports newlines.
Font family	Built-in fonts (Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Times, Courier, Verdana, Trebuchet, Comic Sans).
Font size	8–72 px.
Font weight	Normal / Bold.
Font style	Normal / Italic.
Decoration	None / Underline / Line-through.
Color	Hex picker.

Pro Pro lets you embed dynamic placeholders like {{date}}, {{user}}, {{ip}}, {{copyright}} — see Pro features → Dynamic placeholders.

Image watermark

Use case: a transparent logo PNG, a "© Studio" badge, or a stamp.

In Basic → Type, select Image. The Appearance tab now shows:

Field	What it is
Watermark image	Pick from the media library. PNG with transparency works best.
Size mode	Original / Custom px / Scaled %.
Custom width (if Custom px)	Width in pixels.
Scale percentage (if Scaled %)	100 = watermark width = image width. 25 = watermark is 25 % the width of the target image.
Output quality	JPEG quality (1–100). 90 is sane.

SVG watermarks work only when Imagick is the active library. GD doesn't read SVG. See Installation §3.

3. Position the watermark

Switch to the Appearance tab → Position section.

The 9-point grid:

┌──────────────────────┐
│  ◯       ◯       ◯   │   top-left | top | top-right
│                       │
│  ◯       ◯       ◯   │   left | center | right
│                       │
│  ◯       ◯       ◯   │   bottom-left | bottom | bottom-right
└──────────────────────┘

Field	What it is
Position	Pick one of the 9 anchors.
Offset X	Horizontal nudge from the anchor (pixels or %). Negative = left.
Offset Y	Vertical nudge from the anchor. Negative = up.
Offset unit	pixels or percentage.

Common combos:

• Bottom-right + (-20 px, -20 px) — 20 px in from the corner.
• Center + (0 %, 0 %) — perfectly centred.

4. Set rules — when this watermark applies

Switch to the Rules tab.

In the free plugin you can match by:

• Post type — post, page, attachment, custom CPTs.
• Image size — only watermark full, or large, or specific sizes.

Pro Pro adds a much larger condition list — see Conditional rules.

If you leave rules empty, the watermark applies to every uploaded image.

5. Save & test

Click Save Watermark. Now upload a fresh image at Media → Add New:

1. Pick a JPEG or PNG.
2. Wait for upload + thumbnail generation.
3. Click the new attachment → check the preview. The watermark should be visible at your chosen position.

Open the same image at different sizes (Large / Medium / Thumbnail) — each should be watermarked according to your rules.

6. (Optional) Watermark existing media

You probably have hundreds of images already. To watermark them in bulk:

1. Open Media → Library in List view.
2. Tick the images you want to watermark.
3. From the Bulk actions dropdown, pick Apply Ultimate Watermark (and the specific watermark name).
4. Click Apply.

If you have very many (10 000+), Pro adds a batch processor (wp_schedule_single_event queue) — see Performance.

The bulk action also has a Remove watermark option that restores from the originals backup. See Settings → Backups.

7. (Pro) Turn on on-the-fly frontend display

PROWatermark on the fly, never burn the original

Pro can render the watermark at request time — your originals stay untouched on disk; the visitor sees a watermarked version. Edit the watermark, refresh — done. No bulk re-process.

Unlock OTF →

To enable:

1. Edit your watermark template.
2. Switch to the Display tab.
3. Toggle Display on frontend.
4. Pick: apply to content (post body images), thumbnails, WooCommerce galleries.
5. Optionally bypass for logged-in roles (default: administrator).
6. Save.

Watermarked output is cached at uploads/ultimate-watermark-frontend-cache/wm_<md5>.ext. The cache is invalidated automatically when the watermark template changes (md5 includes file mtime).

Where to go next

• 🖼️ Watermarks — every text / image field in detail.
• 📐 Positioning & sizing — anchors, offsets, scaling.
• 🎯 Conditional rules — target-specific watermarks.
• ⚙️ Global settings — backups, right-click protection.
• 💎 Pro features overview — what Pro unlocks.