About this page
OverlayPicture does one thing: it puts pictures on top of a photograph and lets you move each one until it looks right. A logo, a transparent PNG, a drawn light leak, a cut-out of somebody who was not at the party. Every one keeps its own edges and its own settings, and you can take any of them off again.
It runs on the machine in front of you. There is no account, no server holding your files for a while, and no upload step hiding behind a progress bar — the photograph is read by this browser tab, drawn on by this browser tab, and written back out by this browser tab. That is a technical fact about how the page is built rather than a promise about how carefully somebody stores things.
The decision this whole thing rests on
The photograph stays put and everything else sits on it. This page began with one element per pass and now holds a short deck of them — up to twelve — because a logo, a light leak and a sticker on the same picture turned out to be the ordinary case rather than the exotic one.
What it still refuses is everything that turns a placing tool into a program you have to learn: groups, nested layers, adjustment layers, a canvas bigger than the photograph by default. Each overlay has a card, a place, a mode, a strength and a mask — a line of text is one more kind of overlay, with its own font, colour and backing — and one undo history covers the lot.
What this page leaves alone
A tool that does everything does nothing convincingly, so a good deal of obvious neighbouring work is deliberately absent. Two photographs merged edge to edge into a collage, a photo resized or compressed for its own sake, a background swapped behind an extracted subject, somebody else's mark taken off a picture, and a cut-out saved on its own as the finished product are all separate jobs. The export can hit a size or a kilobyte limit because an exam form asks for one, not because this is a compressor.
None of those jobs is linked from here. Describing the job is enough to send you looking for the right tool; this site links to nothing outside itself.
How it is built
A static site — no server, no endpoint that could receive a picture even by accident, and a check in the build that fails if a network call ever appears in a module that can reach pixel data. The compositing is ordinary canvas drawing; the sixteen mixing modes are the browser's own, because reimplementing them in a shader would spend download weight on behaviour the platform gives away. The textures are arithmetic rather than files, so there is nothing to licence and nothing to fetch. Fonts are served from this domain and from nowhere else.
The preview and the saved file are the same drawing at two scales: every position and size is stored in the photograph's own pixels, and the test suite compares the preview against the exported file for all sixteen mixing modes. Text is drawn again at the saved size rather than enlarged from the screen.
When something is wrong — and things are wrong on every site of this kind — the fastest fix usually comes from knowing the photograph: its format, roughly its size, and which browser. The page tells you what it noticed about a file the moment you open one, and that notice is usually the same thing we would need to hear.
Elsewhere on this site
- Place something on a photoThe stage and a deck of layers: logos, stickers, textures or a second photo, each moved until it looks right.
- Add a logo to a photoOpens small, in the corner, inside the margin a crop is least likely to take.
- Overlay or watermarkA mark you want read against a mark meant to be ignored, and why the tools differ.
- PrivacyWhat happens to a file you open, the cookieless visit count, and the one model download.