Just fire up Irfanview and browse to the images you want to deal with. Hit the ‘b’ key on the keyboard or choose File | Batch Conversion from the menu. Select the files to which you want to apply a watermark, and then click the advanced button. If you saw my post on adding borders to images a couple of weeks ago then you might have already been in here. This time we want to take a look in the “Add overlay text” option.
As you can see, there are a number of options that you can use to set the watermark up exactly as you want it. Let’s work through them quickly.
X-Coord and Y-Coord are the offset, in pixels, from the start corner. Margins, if you like. Width and Height are the size of the usually invisible box the text sits inside. Start Corner is the same as the alignment options we set in PicMarkr, except that there is, thankfully, no centre option.
Add your watermark text in the box, appending date, time and a copyright symbol if required.
Irfanview has one outstanding feature that might be of use to you here. It uses placeholders and can change the watermark for each image. As a simple example, you can put the text ‘$N’ in the text box, and each image will be watermarked with its own filename. Click the Help button for more info.
Adjust font size, colour and alignment as you please, then click OK to return to the advanced settings page. After checking that you haven’t inadvertently left any other options turned on, click OK again to return to the Batch Conversion page.
Take a moment to think through the options you’ve chosen, make sure you’re not overwriting anything you shouldn’t, and click Start Batch.