TSR Watermark Image vs Proton Drive's watermark tool
We're not going to attack Proton's privacy story, because it's a good one and attacking it would be dishonest.
Proton's watermark maker runs entirely in your browser. They state plainly: "Your images never leave your device." No account, no upload, no daily cap, free. If you want to watermark a handful of photos privately without installing anything, it does that, and it does it well.
So this isn't a privacy comparison. It's a scope comparison.
What Proton's tool is actually for
It's a free utility attached to a storage product. Proton makes its money on encrypted mail and encrypted storage; the watermark tool exists to bring people to the brand and to be useful while they're there. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to build, and it explains its shape: text or a logo, size, opacity, spacing, angle, font, colour, live preview, batch a few dozen images, download.
It is not trying to be a professional watermarking application, and it doesn't claim to be.
Proton makes the point for us
There's a line on their own page worth quoting, because it's unusually candid:
Watermarking doesn't remove embedded metadata — you should sanitise files separately before sharing.
They're right, and it cuts both ways.
Metadata is a privacy risk — GPS coordinates in a holiday photo tell people where you live. It's also your copyright claim. The IPTC fields hold your name, your copyright notice, your contact details and your licensing terms, and that's the half of the claim a machine can read.
So the real requirement isn't "strip it" or "keep it". It's control: keep the fields that prove the image is yours, drop the ones that expose you. Proton's tool gives you neither; it just doesn't handle metadata.
TSR Watermark Image preserves EXIF, XMP and IPTC on every paid edition, with GPS, ID3 and several hundred further tag groups on Share editions and above — deliberately, as a setting, so your copyright survives the batch.
Where the free tool stops
Batch size. Proton handles dozens of images. Ours has no limit on paid editions — one customer ran over 8,000 TIF files in a single pass.
Saved profiles. Every Proton session starts from scratch. Ours saves a configuration and reuses it, so image 8,000 gets treated exactly like image 1, next week and next year.
Automation. WatermarkImage.exe "C:\configs\job.wmi" runs a saved profile and exits. Nothing in a browser tab can be scheduled.
Publishing. Watermarked files go straight to WordPress, FTP or secure FTP when the run finishes. No export-then-upload.
3D and embossed watermarks, using the source image as a depth map so the mark is chiselled into the photograph rather than sitting on it.
Dynamic watermark text built from EXIF values, file information, or an incrementing serial number.
Multipage TIF, read and written page by page.
Multiple independent watermarks per image, each with its own position, size and angle.
Format control — JPEG, TIFF, PNG, BMP, GIF, with quality settings and resize in the same pass, and directory structure preserved.
Originals that cannot be overwritten, enforced by the application.
Two kinds of "your files stay private"
Both tools keep your images off a server, so this is a tie in outcome. The difference is what backs it.
With a browser tool, in-browser processing is a claim about code you can't read, running in a page that can be updated at any time. Proton's is more credible than most — it's their entire corporate identity, and breaking it would be an existential story for them.
With an installed application, it's a property you can test. Disconnect the machine. Watermark 500 files. If it completes, no server was involved, and no policy, promise or audit is required to know it.
Both are fine. The second is the one you can demonstrate to a client who asks.
Which to use
Use Proton's tool if you need to watermark a few images, privately, right now, on a machine where you can't install software. It's free, it's honest, and it works.
Use TSR Watermark Image if watermarking is a recurring part of your work: hundreds or thousands of files, consistent settings across jobs, embedded copyright that has to survive, publishing at the end, or a schedule you'd rather not think about.
Download the free version → · [$29.95 once, all your own computers, 90-day money back]
Proton Drive watermark tool details checked August 2026 against proton.me.