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Guide Updated August 2026

How to remove a watermark from a Lottie animation

By Harsh Pal 4 min read, updated 21 August 2026

In this article

Your watermark is almost certainly one layer in a JSON file. Delete the layer, export again, and it is gone. The whole thing takes about a minute in a browser tab and costs nothing, as long as the animation is yours to edit.

Why it comes off so easily

A Lottie is not a video. It is a JSON document listing vector shapes and the keyframes that move them, and a player redraws it on screen every frame. There are no pixels in the file to stamp a logo onto.

So a free plan that wants to mark your export has one option. It adds its logo as another layer, sitting in the same array as yours, in a plain text file it then hands you a copy of.

You can check this yourself in ten seconds. Open the .json in any text editor and search for the tool's name. It will be there, in a layer's nm field, not hidden at all.

The watermark layer inside a Lottie JSON file animation.json "layers": [ "nm": "Made with Lottielab" ind 12345679 "nm": "cta-button" ind 1 "nm": "cursor" ind 2 "nm": "card" ind 3 "nm": "background" ind 4 ] Drawn last, lands on top. One object. Delete it and nothing else moves. Your artwork. Untouched. No watermark field. No flag. No signature over the file.
The watermark sits in the same layers array as your artwork, drawn last so it lands on top.

First, is this file yours?

This part matters more than the technique, so I am putting it before the steps rather than after.

Taking a free-plan badge off an animation you made yourself is fine. It is your work and the badge is a nudge to upgrade. Taking a credit off someone else's animation so you can use it unmarked is a licence violation, and the fact that it takes one keypress does not change that.

  • Yours: an animation you designed and exported on a free plan.
  • Yours: an asset your company bought a licence for that permits editing.
  • Not yours: a preview file from a marketplace you have not paid.
  • Not yours: a creator's animation where the mark is the attribution their licence asks for.
  • Read the terms: free marketplace downloads, which are often personal-use-with-attribution rather than unrestricted.

Removing the Lottielab watermark

Lottielab's free plan exports to Lottie JSON, GIF and MP4, and marks all of them. Watermark-free export is a Pro feature, which as of August 2026 is $12 per editor per month billed annually, or $18 on monthly billing.

Export as Lottie JSON the way you normally would. Open the file in a browser editor. Click the mark on the canvas and the matching layer highlights in the list, usually at the very top because it is drawn last. Press Delete. Export.

Here is the detail I like about this one. A community tool on GitHub called lottielab-watermark-remover does the same job by scanning for a single layer whose index is exactly 12345679 and dropping it. One hardcoded number, and that is the entire watermark.

The Lotiqlab editor with a watermarked animation open. The layer named Made with Lottielab is selected on the canvas with a selection box around it, and is highlighted in both the layers panel on the left and the timeline below.
Clicking the mark on the canvas selects its layer everywhere at once. This is a demo file I built by adding a watermark layer to a sample, not a real Lottielab export.

LottieFiles, and the badge that is not in your file

Two different things get called the LottieFiles watermark and only one of them lives in your JSON.

If a mark came through in the exported file, delete the layer. Same as above.

The small badge in the corner of an embedded animation is different. That is drawn by the LottieFiles player on the page, not stored in the animation, so you can edit the JSON all day and it will not budge. You change it by embedding the file yourself with a plain runtime like lottie-web or dotlottie-web, assuming the asset's licence lets you.

Open the layer list before you start. Thirty seconds there tells you which problem you have.

Jitter, and why export order matters

Jitter marks free exports too, and here the format you pick genuinely decides how hard this is.

Export MP4 or GIF and the mark becomes pixels in every frame. At that point removing it means inpainting or cropping, and both look worse than the watermark did.

Export Lottie JSON and it arrives as a layer, same as everywhere else. So clean the Lottie first, then convert to video from the clean file. Doing it the other way round is the mistake I see most often, and it is not recoverable.

When one Delete is not enough

Three cases behave differently, and the third one is the only genuinely hard one.

The three places a Lottie watermark can hide layers[ ] A layer, at the root Sits beside your artwork in the same array. One keypress assets > precomp assets[ ].layers[ ] Inside a precomp A precomp is just another layers array. One level deeper assets[ ].p = "data:image/png" Baked into a PNG Now it shares pixels with the artwork under it. Not removable
Where the mark is stored decides everything about how hard it is to take off.
  • Split across layers, because the wordmark exported letter by letter. Marquee select the whole group and delete together.
  • Nested inside a precomp. Open the precomp and delete it in there, or delete the precomp layer if it holds nothing else.
  • Baked into a PNG in the assets array. It now shares pixels with your artwork and no editor can separate them. You have to re-export from the source.

Check it still plays

Deleting a layer cannot corrupt a well formed Lottie. It can expose a problem that was already sitting there.

Layers reference each other through a parent field holding another layer's index. If something in your file was parented to the watermark, and that does happen when a designer groups the mark with content, deleting it leaves a pointer to an index that no longer exists. Runtimes disagree about what to do with that.

So play it through once. And if the file is going into an app, test it in the runtime that will actually render it, because lottie-web, lottie-ios and lottie-android do not support exactly the same feature set.

The same animation after pressing Delete. The watermark is gone from the canvas and from the layer list, and the artwork is unchanged.
After Delete. Same artwork, same timing, one fewer layer.
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Quick answers about Lottie files and how Lotiqlab works.

Is it legal to remove a watermark from a Lottie animation?

On your own work, yes. A free-plan export mark on an animation you made is a nudge to upgrade, and the file is yours. On someone else's animation the mark is usually the attribution their licence requires, and stripping it breaks that licence no matter how easy the file format makes it.

Will deleting the watermark layer break the animation?

No. Lottie layers are siblings in one array, so removing one leaves every other layer, keyframe and timing value alone. The single thing to watch for is a layer that was parented to the one you deleted. Play the animation through once and you will spot it.

Can I remove a watermark from a Lottie exported as MP4 or GIF?

Not cleanly. Video and GIF are pixels, so the mark is baked into every frame and removing it means inpainting or cropping. Go back to the Lottie JSON, delete the layer there, and export the video again from the clean file.

Do I have to upgrade my plan to get a clean file?

No. The mark is a layer in a file you already have, so removing it is an ordinary edit in any Lottie editor. Upgrading is the vendor's preferred path and worth it if you use the tool daily, but it is not technically required.

Is the watermark deleted from the file or just hidden?

Deleting the layer removes it from the JSON completely. Hiding the layer instead leaves the data in the file where anyone who opens it can switch it back on, so delete rather than hide.

I cannot find the watermark layer. Where is it?

Click the mark on the canvas and the editor selects its layer for you. If clicking does nothing, it is inside a precomp or baked into an image asset. Open the precomps first, then check the file's assets array for a raster image with the mark drawn into it.