Create a Copyright Preset in Lightroom

Its a new year so time for something that’s good for you but not necessarily fun, sorry. You’ve probably let the new year’s resolution for keywording slip already so here’s something that you only need to do once a year but is worth the (small) effort; creating a copyright preset in Lightroom.

If you didn’t already know, Lightroom allows you to create multiple copyright presets in the metadata panel of the grid or expanded view (press either G or E to view these modes and if you can’t see the Metadata panel on the righthand side press F8, click on the dropdown arrow to expand the panel if it isn’t already open).

Looking at image 1 You will notice that on the top right that there is an option box (I tend to have it set to EXIF IPTC as it shows most of the information I need there) please set this to whichever you wish as all have access to setting the necessary copyright information.

It may be worth pointing out here that your copyright information is recorded as IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council http://www.iptc.org/site/Home/) data in Lightroom and that EXIF data is information about what the camera did when you pushed the shutter button.

Anyway, the very upmost box of the metadata panel is the preset box (see image above). If you don’t have any copyright information set up this will say none or be blank. Clicking on the down arrow will show all the available presets and an option to edit presets.

If you don’t have a preset click on “edit presets” and it opens a very large set of options. Now I can’t tell you what to fill and not to fill in here as I’m not a copyright lawyer and copyright varies from country to country but I would at least add contact details and set copyright status to copyrighted. What I can tell you to do is, once you have filled in your information to press the “check filled” button at the bottom of the panel as this means that any information you have put will be added to your preset and anything without information will be excluded. Once you are finished entering your data click on the preset dropdown at the top of the panel and select “save current settings as a new preset…” you can then name the preset as you wish.

Now when you import photographs remember to add the copyright data from the metadata options in the import dialog (Lightroom has a sticky memory for this and will always use the last used set of info) and you can always add the copyright information there or edit the set you are about to use.

Next year when you come to update your preset all you need to do is select “edit presets” choose this year’s preset from the top dropdown and change the dates to 2013 and save as a new preset, easy! Of course Lightroom 4 will probably have been released by then (the public beta of Lightroom 4 was released yesterday ) and things may have changed by then but…