uMark Lite

The Internet has made it easier than ever to share images, which means it's also easier than ever to steal images. In many cases, a watermark may be the only thing standing between your intellectual property and a potential thief. Though we generally think that watermarks are a great way to prevent unauthorized use of your images and ensure that your name stays connected to your work, some ways of applying watermarks are better than others. UMark Lite is one watermark program that did not particularly impress us. Although it works, it's not as versatile or efficient as some other programs we've seen.

The program's interface is plain and a little sparse, with a series of check boxes and text areas for customizing the watermark. You can choose text, a logo, or both, and there are options for size, opacity, font, shadow, and orientation. The program supports batch processing of up to 50 images, but we found uMark Lite to be sluggish even while watermarking only one image. The program's preview window is misleading as well; a watermark that looks huge in the preview is actually quite diminutive once applied to an image. uMark Lite also loses points for not having a Help file. Overall, we weren't impressed with uMark Lite; there are plenty of other options that offer many more features and faster processing.

UMark Lite comes as a ZIP file. It installs a desktop icon without asking and leaves a folder behind upon removal. We recommend this program with reservations.