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Among the useful features of Picasa 3 is the ability to add watermarks to your photos. There are two ways of doing this. Automatically and manually.

Watermark photos automatically

This method is easier but has some limitations. You can set Picasa to automatically watermark photos with a line of text every time you export them to your own computer or upload them to Picasa Web Albums.

To automatically export photos with a watermark, hit the export button and tick the “Add a watermark” check box at the bottom of the window that pops up. Then you may enter some text to stamp your photo with. It can be your name, domain, copyright notice, or anything you want. In case you’re wondering how to type the © symbol, just hold ALT and type 0169.

After you twiddle with the other options, hit OK and see your new watermarked photo. (To automatically watermark photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums, go to Tools, Options, and do the same thing under the Web Albums panel)

Picasa 3 always stamps the watermark at the lower-right corner of the photo. Unfortunately, (as of now) there seems to be no way to change the font and position of the watermark. Good thing the color of the watermark text automatically adjusts (either black or white) depending on the composition of the photo. If you choose to export to smaller or larger resolutions, the watermark also adjusts to a readable but still unobtrusive size.

Customized watermarking with the text tool

If you’re not happy with the simple text watermark above, there’s another way that lets you customize the watermark to suit your style.

In library view, double-click the thumbnail of a photo you want to watermark to see the editing functions on the left side of the screen. Click the Text button under the Basic Fixes panel.

The Text button in Picasa 3

Then, click on the part of the photo where you want the watermark to appear and type in the text you want. The panel on the left side of the screen lets you control the font style, size, color, outline, and transparency. In case you have pre-existing captions for the photo, there’s also a button to copy the caption text.

Playing around with the controls surrounding the text lets you rotate, scale, and drag the text around the photo. No longer are you limited to the small black or white text that’s locked into the lower-right side of the picture. By the way, you can have more than one text element per photo.

Picasa's controls to drag, rotate, and scale text

Click the apply button to save the changes and see your photo with the text overlay.

What if you need to watermark many photos? Simply return to the library view and select a picture with an existing text overlay? Go to the “Edit” menu and click “Copy Text”. Now, select all the photos you want to watermark and return to “Edit” and then click “Paste Text”. All the photos should now have the same watermark on them. Don’t worry if your images have different resolutions. The text overlay adjusts accordingly to the resolution of the images so the watermark should never look too small nor too large.

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