Tilkie vs. visible watermarks

How a visible watermark works

The app overlays a logo, text, or pattern onto the product image. Because the mark is part of the file that ships to the browser, it travels with any copy a visitor saves, which is a genuine advantage over methods that only act on your own site.

Where it holds up, and where it stops

The mark is visible to everyone who views the photo, including customers, so it changes how the product is presented. It can also be removed. A mark near a corner or edge can be cropped out, and generative AI object-removal and inpainting tools, many of them free, reconstruct the area under a mark in seconds, including semi-transparent marks placed across the whole image.

Increasing the size or opacity of the mark makes removal harder but covers more of the photo your customers see, so the trade-off moves rather than disappears.

Proof of ownership

A takedown request asks a host or marketplace to act on a demonstration that the image is yours. A visible mark is evidence of branding, but once it has been cropped or removed there is nothing left on the copy to tie it back to you, and the method does not, on its own, let you find a copy elsewhere or produce an ownership record.

How invisible watermarking differs

Tilkie embeds an invisible watermark across the whole image using TrustMark, the neural watermarking engine backed by Adobe. The photo your customers see is unchanged, the mark is designed to survive cropping, resizing, re-encoding, and screenshots, you can detect a copy by URL or upload, and a confirmed detection produces a Chain of Proof certificate built for takedowns.