Add Copyright To Your Photos In Lightroom

Photographs enter the Internet at an amazing rate of about 3.2 billion images every day. Quite likely, most of them do not include a copyright statement. That may be due to people not thinking about copyrights or because adding that to every photograph you take may be cumbersome. What if I told you that you can do that automatically in Lightroom without thinking about it?

Intellectual Property Rights

When you select a frame, decide on the angle, lighting, and other elements, and click the shutter, you own the intellectual property rights to that image. For truly unique photographs, “the U.S. Copyright Office recommends registering it with us to make a public record of your ownership, as well as for additional legal benefits like the ability to bring an infringement claim for U.S. works and to seek certain types of monetary remedies.” (US Copyright Office Web Site)

Yes, it has related costs, forms, and so on, but it would give you the ultimate protection against unauthorized uses. You can, and I believe you should indicate that the image has copyright restrictions by adding a watermark on your photographs consisting of a copyright symbol (©) and your name. This is typically done when exporting them for Web usage. However, there is still an escape hatch that an unauthorized user may argue is that there was no stated restriction on the image. They did not have any way of locating the photographer from the simple watermark.

You can create a watermark to be placed on exports, type the copyright symbol on Windows computers by holding the Alt key pressed and from the numeric keyboard (not from the numbers row at the top) typing 169 and then releasing the Alt key, then type your name. Or, copy the symbol from here © and paste it where you want it to appear. I understand on a Mac you type Shift-Option-g but this is what I read not what I typed. You can select to add the watermark preset you create at the time of exporting images. Mine is a simple © A. CEMAL EKIN on the lower right corner.

Metadata To The Rescue

The above hypothetical arguments may be invalid if a copyright notice and contact information are embedded into every image. Anyone interested in using an image knows they can easily read the metadata to find the restriction on usage and the contact information of the copyright holder. This information has to be embedded into every image and Lightroom has an easy way of doing this. I am sure other software has the same feature but I will explain the process in Lightroom which may be easily replicated in other software.

Create A Metadata Preset

In Lightroom, choose the library module, and from the top menu, select “Metadata/Edit Metadata Presets. See two screen captures below.

Click on the images to see them larger, uncropped, and read their titles.

When you see the Edit Metadata Presets panel, scroll until you see the IPTC Copyright group. As the field labels indicate, enter your full name and select the Copyrighted option from the Copyright field. Enter the usage conditions into the Rights Usage Terms field. My statement reads: “No usage for any purpose without prior written permission. All rights reserved.” Into the Copyright Info URL enter your Web site address, as I entered mine.

In the next group, IPTC Creator, enter your name, address, phone number, e-mail, and Web site. Double-check the entries, and when you are ready to save the metadata preset, click on the top dropdown which most likely reads “Custom.” From the drop-down selector, pick the save as new preset option and give it a name like “A. C. Ekin copyright.”

Using The Preset

Now that your copyright metadata preset is ready, you can easily apply it to all your current images. Remember that this step will remove any previous information you might have entered and replace it with the new one.

• While still in the Library module, if you want to apply the new copyright preset to all your images, select All Photographs from the Catalog panel on the left. See the image below.
• In the grid view, press Ctrl-A to select all the thumbnails
• On the right panel groups, select the Metadata panel
• If you want to see the metadata after it is added, select the EXIF and IPTC option from the dropdown to the left of the panel title
• Now, click on the dropdown next to Preset and select the new one you have created. Depending on how many images you have in your catalog, this may take a little time but all your image files will now be marked with your copyright information.

Future Use

If you use an import preset, you can select this metadata to be part of it, and it will automatically be applied during the import. You can do it manually every time you import images. When you start the import process select the metadata preset from the Apply During Import panel.

Better yet, create an import preset and include this selection in it. This article on Lightroom Import Presets will get you going!

Other Options?

Yes, there are other ways of adding copyright metadata to your photographs but they may be limited or not automated. Most cameras, if not all, have an option on the menu to add your name and minimal copyright information. Typing the full text may be cumbersome on that tiny screen. However, you will do it once, or you can use camera connective software provided by the manufacturer to add this information.

Another option is to use Adobe Bridge or Photoshop to add an extensive EXIF and IPTC metadata set to your images. Photoshop can do it on an image that is currently open. However, in the Adobe Bridge thumbnail grid, you can select multiple thumbnails and add the metadata to all of them at once.

The menu options for both Photoshop and Bridge are the same: File/File Information. After that, a pop-up panel will offer the same fields presented in this article using Lightroom. You can fill them in with the same content and apply it to the open image in Photoshop or selected images in Bridge.

There are also dedicated EXIF or IPTC metadata management software. ExifTool has been around for quite some time, and some image-viewing software like XnView MP has a panel for displaying or changing the metadata on files. But neither is easy to use, at least for me.