April 28, 2026
The Stolen Commission That Changed Sofia's Workflow
After a preview was reposted as someone else's work, Sofia watermarked 18 portrait images online before relaunching her commissions page at 6 PM.
Sunday afternoon, two weeks before her spring commission opening. Eighteen finished portrait JPEGs sat on Sofia's desktop, ready to refresh her Instagram highlights and the grid on her commissions page. None of them watermarked yet.
She had put it off for a year. Then in March, a friend forwarded an Instagram account with two of her portraits passed off as someone else's commission samples. The watermarking could not wait anymore. She needed to add a watermark to multiple photos in one batch, the same logo in the same corner of each, and the relaunch announcement was going out at 6 PM.
Eighteen JPEGs and a Cease-and-Desist
Sofia takes Procreate portrait commissions through Instagram. The preview JPEGs she sends clients before final payment had been quietly making the rounds on a couple of reseller pages. The cease-and-desist she sent in March worked, but only after a stranger's Etsy shop had been selling prints of her ballerina commission for two months.
What she tried first did not hold up. Procreate's stamp brush is a one-image-at-a-time tool. Her old Photoshop subscription had lapsed. A free Mac app she trial-installed last summer left "Created with Photo Stamper" across the bottom of every export, which was the exact opposite of the goal.
A Tip From the Illustrator Discord
She typed "watermark images online no install" into Google around 3 PM. MyTools came up second. It also matched a recommendation an illustrator in her freelance Discord had dropped the week before, when somebody else asked the same question. She opened a tab.
Watermarking Eighteen Portraits in One Pass
She dragged the eighteen JPEGs onto the page. Thumbnails appeared along the bottom, with the total file size at the top. She switched the watermark type from text to image and uploaded her hand-lettered "@sofiamakespeople" logo, white type on a transparent PNG. Width 18 percent. Anchor: bottom-right. Margin 4 percent. Opacity 65 percent.
She clicked through a few thumbnails in the live preview. The ballerina portrait, with its pale studio background, made the white logo bloom too brightly, so she dropped opacity to 55. The cat had been sleeping on the radiator since the morning. She toggled tile mode briefly to see what it would look like on her work-in-progress posts later, then turned it off for the finished pieces.
Click Apply. The little counter ticked up: 1 of 18, 2 of 18, then 18 of 18 in maybe forty seconds. The browser handed back a ZIP.
The Relaunch Went Out at 5:48
She swapped the new previews into her Instagram highlights, refreshed the grid on her commissions page, and the 6 PM announcement was already in her drafts when she finished. By Tuesday, four DMs about open slots for the spring round. None of the watermarked previews has shown up on any reseller account so far. One of her followers messaged to say the "new branding" looked great. Sofia did not explain.
Why It Stayed on Her Laptop
What she liked most was that the eighteen JPEGs never went to a server. The portraits in her previews are commissioned work, often based on a client's photo, and she does not love the idea of them sitting in some third-party cache. She also uses the image compressor on the same site to fit her uploads under Instagram's size cap, and she has cropped portraits there when a client asked for a reformatted version. No install, no monthly fee, and she can do it from the iPad on her sister's couch.
One Sunday afternoon, eighteen portraits, and a commissions page she could refresh without waiting for the next stranger to sell prints of her work. Try Watermark Image for free →