I received an email from a reader saying he followed our advice and created a copyright preset in Lightroom Classic. He is excited that all future images will now have his copyright information embedded in the image metadata, and wished he’d done it years ago on his older images.
I told him there’s an easy way — here’s how to quickly find all unknown copyright images in your Lightroom Classic catalog and apply the copyright preset.
Lightroom Classic’s powerful search feature
To find all images with an unknown copyright status, click Metadata on the Library filter. Change a column label to Copyright Status. Lightroom quickly shows how many images are copyrighted and how many are not. Click on unknown to filter the results.
Select all images and apply the copyright preset
Use keyboard shortcut Ctrl + A (Windows) or Cmd + A (Mac) to select all unknown copyright status. From the Preset drop-down menu, select a Copyright preset you would like to add. Lightroom adds your copyright information to these images and the status changes to Copyright.
It’s a good idea to check for unknown copyright quarterly — especially when registering your images with the US Copyright Office.
