Don't Lose Your Rights!

How to Easily Update Copyright Year in Adobe Lightroom!

Start the New Year with an important admin task in Lightroom.

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography.

Happy New Year to you! As we begin January, there is a task that you need to do in Lightroom that you might have forgotten about. Here in the UK, when you press the shutter button on your camera, in most cases, you own the copyright to that image. That may be slightly different in other countries, and you may need to register the copyright. However, we can protect our rights by adding metadata attached to the photo that establishes our copyright. If you haven’t done this already, I would strongly recommend that you do. One of my best-paying photographs is a picture I took three years before I became a full-time photographer, and the metadata attached to it at the time has helped me to win several court cases where businesses have used my image without it being licenced.

It is usual to add a copyright statement to the metadata. This statement usually includes the copyright symbol, the year the photograph was taken, and your name or organisation name.

For all that Adobe has done, including some amazing developments over the last few years to Lightroom, there is one thing that really annoys me. The date in the Copyright field has to be updated manually every year. That’s one of the reasons that I don’t use Lightroom professionally to transfer my photos to my hard drive. Instead, I use Photo Mechanic, as I can create templates for metadata that use variables from the metadata produced by the camera, including the date and time the picture was taken.

For most people, just taking photos as a hobby, Photo Mechanic, isn’t necessary, but instead, you need to make a note to update the copyright statement at the start of each year. So how do we do it?

I will start with my preferred version of Lightroom, Lightroom Classic. You need to be in the Library module. Then, go to the Metadata menu at the top and select Edit Metadata Presets. In this pop-up, select the Metadata template you want to edit and scroll down to the Copyright statement, where you can update the year. Now click on the preset box at the top and select Update Preset.

We’ll do the same thing on Lightroom CC. This time, we go to the preferences section of the Adobe Lightroom menu. Click on the Import tab, and then update the year in the Add Copyright to imported images box.

Finally, if you use Lightroom Mobile, click on the ellipses at the top right of the screen and select App Settings. Click on Import, and you can then update the year in the Metadata section.

And that’s it—all the versions of Lightroom have been updated to protect your copyright for another year. I’m not holding my breath, but it would be nice if this were the last year we needed to do this. Maybe Adobe will add metadata variables to their to-do list for 2025! 

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