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Recording a Simple (but Highly Useful) Action

Let’s begin our exploration of creating actions with a simple action that adds your copyright information to an image via the File Info dialog. Later, we’ll copy this action and record some additional steps to add either a visible watermark over the photo, or your copyright notice to the lower right corner of the image.

1. Open up one of your images. In the Actions Palette, click on the New Set icon and name the set “My Actions” (or whatever seems appropriate...I have a set called "Copyright Actions").

2. Click on the New Action button and name the action “Add Copyright to File Info”. If you want to play this action via a function key, you can also specify that. If both the Shift and Command (or Control) check boxes are dimmed, it means that the shortcut is currently taken by another action. If you want to have the action be a certain color when viewed in Button Mode, you can choose a color here. Click Record to start recording the action.

3. From the File menu, choose File Info. In the first panel (Description), enter in your name as Author. Since this Action is designed to work on any image, leave the Title, Description and Keywords section blank (these can be customized later on a per image basis if needed). Under the Copyright status popup menu, select "Copyrighted" (this will also place a copyright symbol in the title bar of the image). Under Copyright Notice, type in whatever you want your notice to be. If you have a web site that you want to refer people to, you can enter your URL. If they open the image in Photoshop and check the File Info, they’ll see all of this information and be able to click the Go To URL button to jump to your web site. Click OK to appy these changes to the File Info and close the dialog.

4. In the Actions palette, click the square Stop button, or choose Stop Recording from the palette options menu. That’s it, you’re done! To proof it, open up another image, or use the History palette and click on the opening snapshot of the image you have been working with to remove the data from the File Info. Now use your assigned function key (if you chose one) or click on the Play button for this new action. When it’s finished (it’ll only take a second) go to File>File Info and double-check that the copyright info has been added. You'll also see a copyright symbol in the title bar of the image. This copyright information will also show up in the File Browser's metadata section.

Now, you can use this action to quickly add your copyright notice to any image. You can also run this action on entire folder of images (more on that in a bit). Next, we’ll explore how to make a copy of this action and add some additional steps so that your copyright notice or a large watermark is visible in the actual image.

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