Text on Photos in Lightroom

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Today’s Question: Question on Lightroom: Can I “type in” a title, name, or date on a picture in Lightroom? And then print out the picture with the text?

Tim’s Quick Answer: While you can’t add text directly onto a photo in Lightroom in quite the same way that you can in Photoshop, you can add text when printing a photo in the Print module, or sharing with the other modules.

More Detail: There are various ways you can add text to an image you are sharing from within Lightroom. You can add text to an existing field in metadata, for example, and then add text to the image using the Photo Info option in the Page section of the right panel in the Print module. After turning on the “Photo Info” checkbox you can choose the applicable metadata field you’d like to add text based on, using the popup to the right of the Photo Info checkbox.

If you’d like a little more flexibility for the text that you add to the photo, you can use the Identity Plate option. Start by turning on the “Identity Plate” checkbox in the Page section of the right panel in the Print module. Then click on the identity plate preview below this checkbox, and choose “Edit” from the popup that appears.

This will bring up the Identity Plate Editor dialog, where you can type the text you’d like to include on the image, and then adjust the font settings for the text. After clicking OK to confirm the changes to the text, you can also drag the text around on the image in order to adjust the specific position of the text.

To be sure, Lightroom does not provide anywhere near the degree of flexibility that Photoshop provides. In Photoshop you can add multiple text layers with a variety of effects, which enables you to create text on a photo in virtually any way you would like. That said, it is possible to add relatively simple text elements to a photo you’d like to share from Lightroom.