My Copyright Registration Workflow

I often get questions from fellow photographers about my copyright registration process. I separate published images from unpublished images and register published images with the United States Copyright Office once every 75 days. Registering published images 5 times a year helps maintain the 90 day registration window for published images to ensure they are fully protected by any potential infringement. I usually register my unpublished images once or twice a year. All of my registrations, unless there’s a specific circumstance requiring otherwise, are group registrations. Generally, if it goes up on my website or is sent to a client for publication, it’s marked as published. Everything else is unpublished. I’ll go through the details of how/what I do below.

The first step is to get Best Business Practices for Photographers by John Harrington. Read it, do what John says, read it again, continue to do what John says, and keep it on your desk.

I use a few software packages to make things easier. These instructions are based on the tools I have and the workflow that I’ve put together — if you have different packages, tools, approach; adjust accordingly. I ingest all of my photos directly from the compact flash card into Photo Mechanic.

This part is important: I create my file names in such a way as to include the date of publication (for published images) or the date of creation (for unpublished images) in the file name, along with other identifying information that’s helpful. For example, if I shoot a basketball game on December 23, 2008 the file name may look something like:

20081223 – Hampton at Virginia (NCAA Basketball)-A113024.jpg

The first 8 numbers are the date of publication (or creation for unpublished). Since this event was shot on the 23rd, the date remains the same… if for instance, I wasn’t able to publish this image until the 24th or later, I would change the first 8 digits in the file name to reflect the date of publication. Then I have a text description of what the file/event was about, followed by a serial number (which Photo Mechanic automatically augments using the {seqn} tag). If the image goes into my unpublished folder, and is later published, I rename to match the date of publication, and move to my current published folder. If you don’t do this, or otherwise denote when images were published, you’ll get a letter or phone call from the copyright office, further delaying your registration. If your group registration contains several thousand images, this could be a major problem and cause a big headache — it’s much easier to keep track of everything at the time of publication and creation and I do so through the file name (there’s also metadata but that seems to not be as easy to deal with for the Copyright Office).

I shoot exclusively in RAW — my selections for publication (website or otherwise) are marked in Photo Mechanic with color codes (1 through 9) depending on their priority. I then select all of the desired images and do basic edits with Adobe’s Camera Raw (part of Photoshop) and create JPEGs from the RAW files. Then, if needed, I do additional edits in Photoshop. I caption, keyword, and apply metadata to my images back in Photo Mechanic and then transmit to my PhotoShelter enabled-website, client, etc.

From there, I open up Adobe Lightroom. I import the folder containing the images I just created. Then in LR I go to Edit -> Select By Color Label -> No Label — this selects all of the images in the folder that had no color tag applied to them and are therefore designated in my system as unpublished. I then go to File -> Export where I enter in the various settings roughly as follows: Files on disk; Folder – the location where you want the images for registration to go; Template – filename; Format: JPEG; Quality: 70; Color Space: AdobeRGB (1998); Resize to fit: Long edge; 800 pixels, 72dpi;

This can be automated by defining a “user preset”. In the same export window, click on “Add” to add a user preset, name it “Unpublished Copyright” or “Published Copyright” — apply your desired settings, save them, and then you’ll see the show up in the File -> Export with Preset option.

After exporting the unpublished images, I then go to Edit -> Invert Selection — this then selects all of the images that I have color tags (and therefore marked for publication) in Photo Mechanic. I do the same process as above for unpublished images, except I make sure these images go into my pre-designated published images folder.

The benefit of using Lightroom, especially for my workflow is that I don’t have to create a separate batch of JPEG images from RAW files to create JPEGs to send to the copyright office. Lightroom creates the reduced sized images for me and I don’t have to store the extra high-res JPEG. For me, this saves time, disk space and frustration.

I use John’s naming suggestion for keeping track of various folders containing my images that I’m going to send to the Copyright Office. A folder named U0801 would be a folder of unpublished images, created in 2008 and it is the first such folder for that year. A folder named P0805 contains published photographs, published in 2008, and it is the 5th such folder (registration) that I have for the year. John explains everything about this in much greater detail in his book. Likewise, I follow his examples and forms provided with his book for filing with the Copyright office. I now do some of my registrations via the Copyright Office’s online registration system — it’s fairly easy to use and saves $10 on the registration fees.