Should you watermark client galleries?

Usually not on a delivery gallery, and usually yes on a proofing one. The distinction matters more than the question, because the two galleries are doing different jobs and a watermark helps one and damages the other.

What a watermark actually does

A watermark raises the cost of casual reuse. Someone who would have right-clicked and posted your photo without credit now has to crop, clone or run a removal tool, and most people will not bother. That is a real effect and it is worth having in the right place.

What it does not do is prevent theft. Any mark visible on a screen can be removed by someone who wants to remove it, and modern inpainting tools have made that considerably easier than it was. Treat a watermark as friction, not as protection - and be sceptical of any product that describes one as unremovable.

It also does nothing about the two things that actually hurt: someone screenshotting a low-resolution preview, and someone using an image commercially. The first is unstoppable by design, and the second is a licensing and legal question that a mark on a JPEG does not settle.

The two galleries

A proofing or selection gallery is where a watermark earns its place. The client is choosing, not receiving. A discreet mark makes it obvious these are not the finished files, discourages the "these are fine, thanks" shortcut past your delivery, and costs the client nothing because they are not keeping these images anyway.

A delivery gallery is the product. The client has paid; the photographs are theirs. Marking them says you expect to be stolen from by the person who just hired you, and it is the single most common way a beautiful gallery is spoiled. If you are marking delivered work, the thing to fix is usually the contract or the pricing, not the JPEG.

Portfolio and public-facing work is the genuine grey area. Here the calculation is about attribution rather than theft: a mark travels with the image when somebody reposts it, which is worth something if your work circulates.

If you do mark

• Small and consistent beats large and defensive. A mark that ruins the photograph has cost you more than the theft would have.
• Corner or edge, unless the whole point is that the image cannot be used - in which case a tiled or diagonal mark across the frame is the honest version of that intent.
• Do not mark what somebody bought. Prints, licensed files and paid downloads should be clean.

How Encore does it

Watermarks are set per gallery and can be overridden per frame, so a proofing gallery and a delivery gallery under the same studio behave differently without any file juggling. Marks are baked into the stored image at generation time rather than applied by the browser, so what a client sees is what exists.

Anything somebody paid for is served clean: prints are made from the unmarked original even when the gallery around them is marked. Encore does not describe its watermarks as unremovable, for the reason in the second section.