Your watermarking tool is deleting your copyright info

Here's a failure mode almost nobody checks for.

You fill in your copyright fields properly — creator, copyright notice, contact, usage terms. Then you watermark the images before publishing. The tool re-encodes them, and the copyright information is gone.

You've published files with the visible half of your claim and none of the machine-readable half. The visible watermark can be removed in seconds by anyone with an inpainting tool. What's underneath it now says nothing about who made the picture.

That's a worse position than doing nothing, because it looks protected.

So we tested eight tools to find out which ones do it.

Why the embedded fields matter

The visible watermark is for humans. The embedded metadata is for machines, and machines are what handle your images at scale.

Stock agencies and licensing platforms read IPTC on ingest. Missing creator and copyright fields mean manual correction or rejection.
Image search and reverse-image tools use embedded rights data for attribution.
CMSs and DAM systems populate credit lines from IPTC automatically.
AI training opt-out lives here — the IPTC/PLUS plus:DataMining property is stored in XMP, inside the file.
In a dispute, an intact IPTC:CopyrightNotice is evidence of a deliberate claim, which matters for arguing wilful infringement in some jurisdictions.

Strip the metadata and every one of those quietly fails, without an error message.

The fields we tracked

IPTC:CopyrightNotice IPTC:By-line IPTC:Credit
IPTC:Contact IPTC:Source
XMP-dc:Rights XMP-dc:Creator XMP-dc:Title
XMP-xmpRights:UsageTerms XMP-xmpRights:Marked
XMP-plus:DataMining
EXIF:Copyright EXIF:Artist EXIF:DateTimeOriginal
EXIF:Make / Model / LensModel
GPS:GPSLatitude / GPSLongitude
ICC profile

GPS is listed separately on purpose. Losing it is often what you want — it's the field that tells strangers where you live. The ideal isn't "keeps everything", it's keeps your rights data, lets you drop your location.

Results

Tool	IPTC rights	XMP rights	`plus:DataMining`	EXIF capture	GPS	ICC profile
TSR Watermark Image (paid)	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`
TSR Watermark Image (free trial)	Not preserved¹	Not preserved¹	Not preserved¹	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`
Visual Watermark	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`
Watermarkly	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`
iLoveIMG	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`
Watermark.ws	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`
Canva	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`
Proton Drive	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`
MakeWatermark	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`	`[TEST]`

¹ Metadata copying is a paid-edition feature; the free trial doesn't do it. Stated here rather than omitted.

Summary paragraph: [TEST — write after the results are in. If competitors do well, say so plainly. A fair table that admits we don't win every cell is worth ten slanted ones, because it's the one people link to.]

Why tools lose metadata

Rarely malice. Almost always architecture.

Decode, draw, re-encode. The simplest way to watermark is: decode to a pixel buffer, draw on it, encode a new JPEG. Nothing carries the metadata across unless the developer wrote code to do it, and the metadata isn't in the pixel buffer.

Browser canvas. canvas.toBlob() produces a clean file with no EXIF, IPTC or XMP. Any client-side browser tool that goes through canvas will drop everything by default. That's the platform behaving as designed.

Design tools render, they don't edit. Canva's output is a rendered design that happens to contain your photograph. It was never your file with a layer on it.

Partial support. Some tools keep EXIF — the easy, well-supported one — and drop IPTC and XMP, which is where your rights data actually lives. Halfway is common and easy to miss, because "keeps EXIF ✓" appears on the feature list.

Test your own pipeline in two minutes

Whatever you use, including ours, check it. Install ExifTool, then:

# 1. Put rights data on a test file
exiftool -overwrite_original \
  -IPTC:CopyrightNotice="© 2026 Your Name. All rights reserved." \
  -IPTC:By-line="Your Name" \
  -IPTC:Credit="Your Studio" \
  -XMP-dc:Rights="© 2026 Your Name" \
  -XMP-dc:Creator="Your Name" \
  -XMP-xmpRights:UsageTerms="No AI/ML training use." \
  -XMP-xmpRights:Marked=True \
  -EXIF:Copyright="© 2026 Your Name" \
  -EXIF:Artist="Your Name" \
  test.jpg

# 2. Record the before state
exiftool -a -G1 -s test.jpg > before.txt

# 3. Watermark test.jpg with the tool you're evaluating

# 4. Compare
exiftool -a -G1 -s watermarked.jpg > after.txt
diff before.txt after.txt

Or the one-line version, if you only want the headline:

exiftool -a -G1 -s watermarked.jpg | grep -iE "copyright|creator|rights|by-line|credit|datamining"

Nothing back means your tool deleted your copyright claim.

Windows, no diff:

Compare-Object (Get-Content before.txt) (Get-Content after.txt)

What to do if your tool fails the test

Re-inject afterwards. Copy the metadata from the original onto the watermarked file:

exiftool -TagsFromFile original.jpg -all:all -gps:all= watermarked.jpg

That restores everything and drops GPS. It works, but it's an extra step per batch and it's easy to forget on the one job that mattered.

Or use a tool that doesn't lose it. TSR Watermark Image preserves EXIF, XMP and IPTC through the batch on every paid edition, with GPS, ID3 and several hundred further tag groups on Share editions and above. It's a setting, not an accident.

Either way — run the test on your own pipeline. Once. Then you know, instead of assuming.

Download the free version → · See the full list of metadata formats we handle →

Tested [DATE] on then-current versions with a single source file ([camera/format]). Tools change; if you get a different result, tell us and we'll re-test and update this page. We'd rather be corrected than wrong.

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