This Lightroom plugin allows you to inject metadata related to your Creative Commons choices into exported copies of images.

If you choose to share your copyrighted image with the world under a creative-commons license, this plugins injects details of the license into the metadata of exported copies, to tightly associate your license choice with the image.

This metadata tagging is much better than a simple text- or icon-based notation near the image, or RDFa markup in HTML, because it keeps your express wishes tied to the image even when it is later downloaded, copied, shared, deep linked, etc.

You can configure the kind and form of metadata to add, but as a quick example, the following metadata display via my online image-metadata viewer, of the metadata in the first photo of my recent post “Cute Little Melodrama in Five Photos”, illustrates the Creative-Commons metadata I chose to add:

For maximum effectiveness in both protecting the rights you chose to reserve, and in sharing the rights you choose to share, use this plugin in addition to other notation methods.

Download

This plugin works in Lightroom 5 and Lightroom 4.

The same download works for both Windows and Mac. See the box to the upper right for the download link link (in orange) and installation instructions.

Library Setup

After the plugin is installed, a new metadata tagset is available, as illustrated at right.

It includes standard metadata fields such as Filename, Artist, and Copyright, and one plugin-specific field, “Creative Commons”, marked in purple in the screen snippet at right. (In that example, “BY-NC” is the standard shorthand notation for Creative Commons's "Attribution Required, No Commercial Use license.)

When one or more images are selected, you can set the “Creative Commons” field to any of the six licenses that Creative Commons defines, or three different ways to indicate that the image is not to be creative-commons licensed.

Possible Field Values

Unspecified	The default... no creative-commons license.
Not My Image	No creative-commons license because you don't own copyright.
No	A specific chose not to release with a creative-commons license.
CC BY CC BY-ND CC BY-SA CC BY-NC CC BY-NC-ND CC BY-NC-SA	The six Creative Commons licenses described here.
CC Zero	The Creative Commons “Zero” public-domain waver described here

The three “not Creative Commons licensed” values (Unspecified, Not My Image, and No) are all treated the same as far as the plugin is concerned... no license information will be added to exported copies... but the different values may be convenient for your own data maintenance.

For better integration with your workflow, you can add the “Creative Commons” field to your main metadata display with my “Metadata-Viewer Preset Editor” plugin.

At right is an example of what the selector looks like when viewed via my personal metadata viewer preset, where I've moved the Creative-Commons field to be near the Copyright/Artist fields, and I've shortened the field label to “C. Commons” to keep the label column narrow, preserving more of the panel width for actual image metadata.

Export Setup

Changing an image's “Creative Commons” metadata field to a license value doesn't actually change the image in your library, but if you then enable the plugin's section in your Export or Publish dialog, the exported copies of images with a creative-commons license get the appropriate metadata added.

The screenshot at right illustrates how to add the plugin's section to an Export or Publish dialog.

(Only the marked “Creative Commons” section is added by this plugin... the other items seen in the screenshot from my personal workflow are added by other plugins that I use.)

Once enabled within the Dialog, a large “Creative Commons” section appears. Here's an example of what it looks like within my own personal workflow:

As you can see, there are a lot of sanity checks (and I've enabled all of them) to help guard against accidentally releasing a mistaken image/license combination.

Warning: No Video Support

The export metadata-injector works only with images; it completely ignores all videos and no settings matter for video. Videos are passed through by Lightroom and the plugin never even sees them.

You can still set the “Creative Commons” metadata field for videos if you like, but doing so has no meaning other than perhaps a notation to yourself.

Warning: Lightroom Bug

I've noticed (and reported to Adobe) a bug in Lightroom that causes the metadata display for multiple images to sometimes be wrong.

Normally, if the selected images have multiple values for a particular field (e.g. the “City” field not all being the same city), Lightroom displays “<mixed>” to indicated that they are indeed not all the same.

However, Lightroom seems to always show “Unspecified” for the Creative-Commons field when multiple values are present among the selected images. This unfortunate bug can lead you to believe that all selected images have no creative-commons license, when in fact some or all my well have them. Take care.

Availability

This plugin is distributed as “donationware”. I have chosen to make it available for free — everyone can use it forever, without cost of any kind — but unless registered, its functionality is somewhat reduced after six weeks.

Registration is done via PayPal, and if you choose to register, it costs the minimum 1-cent PayPal fee; any amount you'd like to add beyond PayPal's sliding fees as a gift to me is completely optional, and completely appreciated.

Note: a Lightroom major upgrade, such as from Lr3 to Lr4, de-registers the plugin in the upgraded version, thus requiring (if you want to maintain registration) a new (1-cent if you like) registration code in the upgraded version. It makes for a hassle every couple of years, I know. Sorry. See this note for details.

For details on plugin registration and on how I came into this hobby of Lightroom plugin development, see my Plugin Registration page.

Version History
( Update Log via RSS )

20130501.9

Update for Lr5

20130412.8

Build system update.

20130328.7

Fix for the registration system.

20130220.6

Added support for some new template tokens: FlagStatus (requires Lr4.1 or later), and for Lr3 and later, a bunch of IPTC extended metadata: AdditionalModelInfo, CodeOfOrgShown, DigImageGUID, Event, ImageSupplierImageId, MinorModelAge, ModelAge, ModelReleaseID, ModelReleaseStatus, NameOfOrgShown, PersonShown, PlusVersion, PropertyReleaseID, PropertyReleaseStatus, and SourceType.

20130209.5

More build-system maintenance

20130206.4

Tweak for my registration system

20130201.3

Enhance the {EMPTY} template token so that it interrupts the squelching of superfluous joining characters. Upgraded to the embedded copy of ExifTool to version 9.15.

20121005.2

Based on feedback from the folks at Creative Commons, updated how the various licenses are presented within Lightroom's UI, now using the official shorhands (e.g. "BY-NC") instead of what I came up with ("Attrib NonComm") Added support for CC0 (CC Zero, their public-domain license) Changed he sense of the "must not be marked as public-domain" sanity check to "must be marked as copyrighted". Added more sanity-check options. Added the copyright-status field to the metadata-viewer tagset.

20120925.1

Initial public release