I am cleaning up my Lightroom database and noticed that LRTimelapse altered the IPTC info in thousands of my photos. In particular, it changes the "Creator" tag, which describes who the artist is to a string like "LRTimelapse 3.4.1 - licensed to Jürgen Lobert, Franklin - Private License, no commercial use allowed!"

This is unacceptable! These are raw files that were created by me, not by LRTimelapse. LRT may be altering the meta data but that does not mean that it created the photos. They were taken by me on my cameras and nobody else.

It is OK if you embed your string in the "Software" section, but you should not be altering artist info and remove the original copyright with that.

This needs to be fixed!

LRTimelapse 3.4.1 is many years old.
LRTimelapse never (!) writes into Raw files itself, it only writes into XMP sidecar files.
Also it doesn't write any IPTC tags. It only adds a Creator and CreatorTool tag to the XMP.
You can delete those XMP files and all edits made by LRTimelapse will be gone.

Gunter, this is just one of the many tags I found, all the way through version 5.8, which I am using right now, *All* versions changed my copyright info! And yes, the "creator" tag is part of the IPTC. Lightroom's IPTZ editor has that as one of its choices. I understand that nothing gets written to the raw files, but if it is in Lightroom and I export it to JPG, that info gets written to the JPG file, making it appear that the creator was LRTimelapse, not JM Lobert.

As mentioned, pretending to be the creator is unacceptable. LRT doesn't create anything, it only adds information to make a timelapse. It's OK to leave that info in the "software" tag, but please take this as a request to not write info to the creator tag. The creator is the artist, who owns the copyright, nobody and nothing else.

Thank you.

This post was last modified: 2022-12-29, 11:49 by Gunther.

The "Creator" String will only be written with the private license (or the evalutation version). This is meant as a reminder that private licenses of LRTimelapse are not allowed to be used for commercial work.

if you want LRTimelapse to not touch the "Creator" String, you should crossgrade to LRTimelapse Pro which is allowed for commercial use and doesn't write this tag.
https://lrtimelapse.com/upgrade/

Thanks Gunter, that is certainly one work-around, but I maintain my point that LRT should not be altering what is essentially the copyright of the image.