How to Update Your Copyright Info for 2018

I thought I’d better get this one in for everybody like me who forgot to update their Lightroom Copyright metadata to 2018 (until today).

So, here’s how and where you update it:

NOTE: Also, I’ve got some new tour dates and cities for my Lightroom tour at the end of this post.

STEP ONE: Go to the Library Module; go under the Metadata menu and choose “Edit Metadata Presets” as shown here (by the way — even if you don’t have a Copyright template in place, you can use this same menu to create one, so still choose Edit Metadata Presets to get started).

STEP TWO: When the Edit Metadata Presets window appears (shown above), choose the name of the preset you want to Edit, and it displays your copyright template info (as seen).

STEP THREE: Go to the IPTC Copyright section, and click on the field to the right of Copyright (as shown here), then just type in 2018 right over where it previously said 2016. If you’re creating your first Copyright template, just go ahead and type in the IPTC Copyright and Creator Fields info (as seen here).

STEP FOUR: Once you’ve updated the date, it’s time to save you new preset by going to the pop-up menu at the top of the window and choosing “Save Current Settings as New Preset.”

STEP FIVE: This brings up a small dialog where you can enter the name for your New Preset (as seen above).

STEP SIX: If you don’t have any old 2017 images you haven’t imported into Lightroom yet, then you can delete last year’s preset (you won’t be using it again if you’ve already imported all your images from last year), so if you want to delete it (totally up to you  — you don’t have to), just choose the 2017 Preset from the pop-up menu; then go to the same pop-up menu and choose Delete Preset “2017 Copyright” (or whatever you named it), then click the Done button.

Now that we’ve done all that…there’s this:
Last year when I did this annual post, one of the commenters, Rob Posener, posted this comment:

“This was interesting, but NOT required. For a long time now US copyright law has been in synchronisation with the rest of the world so that you do NOT have to include a year in the copyright statement. Many people and companies still add the year (and still update the year) but only because they really don’t believe the law changed and they feel “more comfortable” with putting it in there (since it does no harm to do so).”

Now, Rob didn’t say whether he is a Intellectual Property Rights attorney or not, and he didn’t point us to any reference or source, so maybe somebody out there can point us to something along those lines. In the meantime, like he said, “It does no harm to do so” and as you just saw, it only takes about 60-seconds to update your copyright info, so…ya know. It’s up to you. 🙂

Hope you found that helpful.

Best,

-Scott

P.S. We added new dates/cities to my Lightroom On tour full-day seminar: My next stops are San Antonio on Thursday, Feb 22nd, and then Houston on Monday, Feb 26th. Hope I get to see you there (here’s the link with details).