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Known Participant
May 4, 2011
Open for Voting

P: Add text notes to photos, stacks, folders, directories, collections

  • May 4, 2011
  • 90 replies
  • 6601 views

Let me add text notes to photo, stacks of photos, and directories of photos so that I can record shot and processing details. I'd like to be able to print the notes along with an image thumbnail.

90 replies

Inspiring
September 14, 2019
You can select what metadata to be shown by selecting from the metadata dropdown list in the right panel. There's a subsection called 'workflow' if you select 'EXIF and IPTC' in the dropdown, This can be multi-line if you press ctrl-enter.
If you select 'IPTC' in the dropdown, the subsection is called 'Status' instead (?!)
Nothing will be seen on the photo but at least it can be used as a small notepad / postit substitute.
johnrellis
Legend
July 2, 2019
The Comments panel is for displaying comments that users have entered on photos that have been published to Flickr, Smugmug, etc. via a LR publishing service, so it's not useful for what you want to do.

I think Lee Jay was referring to the standard metadata fields: Title, Caption, User Comment (in the EXIF tag set of the Metadata panel), Headline.  If your workflow doesn't otherwise use one of these fields, you can use it for your notes. They will expand in the Metadata panel to accommodate multiple lines.
johnrellis
Legend
July 2, 2019
If you're referring to Rob Cole's CustomMetadata plugin, unfortunately Rob passed away 4 years ago and his plugins are no longer supported. You can still download it from here: https://github.com/DaveBurns/rc_CustomMetadata. I don't know how well it works in LR 8.
Participating Frequently
July 2, 2019
It seems that the link to your tool is broken. And JB's Big Note doesn't allow me to add a note in LR6. I paste in the note and it disappears
Participating Frequently
July 2, 2019
how? the Comment section is disabled for every photo I have. So how can I add notes?
Inspiring
February 10, 2017


I am curious why , in the Library module, comments are not supported.  I really need a place to put notes; some type of free form text. Lightroom does a great job of tracking what you did to an image but provides no place to document your thought processes.  I often find myself trying to remember why I made a post processing decision or things that I tried that didn't produce a desired outcome.
Inspiring
February 1, 2017


Using quite a lot of collections in my LR catalogue (about 35 000 photos kept in the catalogue and more than a hundred collections) I would find quite useful and efficient to have a field for collection description.
Inspiring
January 23, 2017


As a professional photographer and author I need to keep notes on photographs that I take. I think every photo has a story and it is hard to remember details over time. Also putting a book together in Lightroom a memo field would be exceptionally important. I small note icon could be added to the edge of the photo. When you click on it Lightroom opens a Memo Field. Since Lightroom is database driven it would seem to be a not so complex task to add a Memo Field to the data storage table and a memo window to add notes. Then in the book module you could create a text area and then past the notes from the photo in the text field.
Inspiring
January 22, 2017


On the Photo drop down menu, could we get a "Notes" tab, that acts like a post it note? attach to an image. It would be real handy with development and printing. Coming back at a later date you could pop the note and see just what you were thinking. i.e. printing an image 3/4 different ways, which one seemed the best. History is no help because it records all or none, but the note could tell you. Maybe the note could be attached to, "noted in history" as well. Maybe a flag could be attached to a history item to mark a preference?
January 22, 2017



As a professional user, using Lightroom since v1 through 4, in conjunction with PS, I have often wanted to make this suggestion: we are frequently needing the ability to use something akin to a simple 'Post-it-Note' to record 'to do' type tasks or other relevant information on an INDIVIDUAL photo in a collection. We often exhaust all our colour coding and rating options, and it would be just SO useful to have a portion of the screen where a little popup can be shown, looking exactly like a post it note, where we can jot down info about the photo. It would greatly improve our workflow, as currently, we have to use notebooks etc to write things down. It is not something you can put in the metadata etc, but an 'on the fly' popup for each photo as requqired. Would be mighty handy.

We would store customers info, print sizes, actions we wish to use, etc etc, the list is endless really. It would be a killer feature in my opinion. We use a Win 7 post it notes currently, but that is not exactly streamlined, and is not tied to each photo, so next to useless.

Would appreciate you consideration