I was working with a freelance client who asked a simple question: how do we add grid watermarks to product images so they don't get copied?
We were on a Google Meet. I shared my screen, assuming this would be a two-minute solution — I Googled it, opened a random watermarking website, and that's when the problem became obvious.
You couldn't grid watermark images without a catch. Every tool demanded a subscription: five, ten, sometimes twenty dollars a month, or it stamped its own branding on top of the image. Their logo, their watermark, their rules. For something that should have been trivial.
I, as a responsible citizen of the internet, thought to myself,
No.
This is not happening today.
Not under my watch.
I wasn't going to tell a client to pay a monthly fee or accept someone else's logo just to protect their own work. Not for something this basic.
So I built a small Python script for them instead. You run it, enter your text and it applies a watermark to all images in that folder.
It didn't need to be limited to one client or one machine. I have a Virtual Private Server. I could deploy it, make it accessible, and remove this problem entirely.
That's how Watermarker was born.
