Lightroom Videos

Lightroom Video – Dynamic Watermarks (well… not really, but kinda)

I always like to do videos that answer questions I get, rather than just doing a video that I “think” everyone wants to know about. Well, this weeks video comes from a question that I’ve gotten in several forms over the last couple years. Recently, some one asked if they could add a watermark to their photos with the current year on them. So basically, Lightroom would have to figure out the year from the metadata (probably not hard) and dynamically add it to the photos when you export them into JPEGS (not so easy). So, there’s really no way to do this, but there is an pretty decent workaround using the Filter Bar which is an area I think a lot of people miss out on. Enjoy!

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3 comments

  1. Scott Teven 9 October, 2013 at 12:07 Reply

    Please Adobe!!!

    Its time to have Lightroom dynamically access metadata fields so individualized text can be displayed in the watermark.

    Thank you development team!

  2. David B 4 February, 2012 at 00:23 Reply

    Neat tip! Another way to do this is to select all of the pictures you want with a specific copyright year (or I guess any text) and change the Copyright field–the second field in last section under IPTC–to the text you want, e.g. Copyright 2010 Matt Kloskowski. Repeat for other selections of photographs (2009, 2011, etc.). Then, when you export, check the watermark option, and instead of picking a preset, choose the default ‘Simple Copyright Watermark.’ The beauty of this is that you can export photos from 2009, 2010, 2011, etc all in one export, and the ‘Simple Copyright Watermark’ setting will dynamically apply the text in that IPTC field for each photograph. This works really, really well if every January 1st you create a new metadata preset that sets that field to the copyright text for the current year, and set that preset as part of your default import process–that way all your photos going forward can be exported at a later date and they’ll be watermarked with the correct year without having to think about it.

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