Two different jobs get called “adding copyright to photos,” and they have almost nothing in common.

One is a visible watermark — a © stamped onto the pixels. The other is metadata: fields written inside the file that name the creator and state the rights, invisibly, travelling with the file wherever it goes. Stock libraries, picture desks, and every automated attribution system read the second one.

This guide is about the second. (Archyv does watermarks too, as part of Image Conversion, but that is a different job.)

Which fields actually carry ownership

There is no single “copyright field,” which is the first thing that trips people up. Ownership is spread across standards that overlap on purpose:

EXIF Artist — the oldest and simplest creator field, written by cameras.
IPTC By-line — the creator field the news and stock industries actually read.
IPTC Copyright Notice — the rights statement itself, e.g. © 2026 Jane Rivera.
XMP Creator and Rights — Adobe’s modern equivalents, and what most current software reads first.

A properly credited file carries the creator in all of them, because you cannot know which one the far end will look at. Any tool that writes only one is leaving gaps.

What Preview and Photos can do (not much)

Preview will show you metadata — Tools → Show Inspector, then the Info tab — which is genuinely useful for checking a file. What it will not do is write these fields, in batch or otherwise.

Apple Photos can add a title, caption and keywords inside its library, and carries some of that into exported copies. It has no notion of an IPTC By-line or a Copyright Notice, and it does not write to your original files on disk.

For a folder of images that need crediting before they leave your machine, neither is the answer.

Adobe Bridge and Lightroom, if you already have them

Bridge does this properly and is free with an Adobe account. Select the files, open File Info, fill in the IPTC fields, apply to the selection. If Bridge is already part of your day, it is a reasonable answer and this guide will not pretend otherwise.

Lightroom handles it at import via metadata presets — the right approach if everything you shoot enters a Lightroom catalogue, and irrelevant if it does not.

The gap both leave is the same one: they assume you live inside them. For files that never touch Adobe — a scanned archive, a folder from a colleague, a set going straight to a client — you need something that works on the folder rather than on a catalogue.

Writing credit across a batch, and the three modes

Archyv splits this across two processes, and which you want depends on how much you are writing.

Photographer Attribution is the fast path for creator and date. Enter a first name, last name and year — any combination, at least one required — and it writes the name into EXIF Artist, IPTC By-line and XMP Creator together, with the year setting the capture-date fields.

Its three modes are the part worth understanding, because they are how you avoid damaging a mixed collection:

Add writes only into files whose photographer fields are empty, leaving existing attribution untouched. This is the one for filling gaps in a collection of mixed provenance, and it is the safe default.
Replace overwrites whatever is there — for correcting or standardising a set you know is wrong.
Clear erases the photographer fields, the year fields, or both.

One useful subtlety: enter only a year, leaving both name fields empty, and it updates the dates while keeping each file’s existing photographer. In that case Add and Replace do the same thing.

For everything beyond creator and date — the copyright notice itself, licensing terms, contact details, captions — use the Metadata Editor in Batch mode: choose a field, enter the value once, apply it across the run. Its ten categories include Creator Contact and Rights & Licensing, and selecting a category narrows the field list to what the job needs. Multi-value fields such as Keywords take values one at a time or as a pasted comma-separated list.

RAW files and video

This is where tools diverge most, and where a workflow quietly breaks.

RAW files are generally not written into. For most RAW formats the metadata goes to a companion sidecar file kept alongside the original; DNG is the exception and is written in place. Supported RAW formats include CR3, CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG, ORF, RAF and RW2, among others. The practical consequence: keep the sidecar with the file. Separate them and the credit is gone.

Video gets the QuickTime Author atom plus an XMP Creator sidecar, so a shoot mixing stills and clips can be credited in a single run rather than two.

Validate it, back it up, then verify it

Writing metadata changes your files, so three habits are worth building.

Let it check your work. The Metadata Editor validates as you type — emails, URLs, dates and coordinates against their formats, with IPTC’s own limits enforced, including the Category field’s three-character cap. Being told at the point of entry beats being rejected by a picture desk later.

Keep a way back. The Create backup before metadata modifications setting copies each file before it is changed. Simulation Mode, in General Settings, performs the whole run without writing anything and reports what it would have done.

Confirm afterwards. Metadata Review is a read-only inspector — it shows what is in the files now and changes nothing. Running it after a batch is how you know the credit landed, rather than assuming.

One last piece of sequencing: credit files before you move, rename or deliver them. The fields live inside the file, so they survive all three — but only if they were written first.

Next: Photographer Attribution and Metadata Editor cover every option in full, Field Categories trims the editor to the fields you use, and Metadata Review confirms the result. If the files also need renaming, do that from the capture date in the same session.