Personalizing Your Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Identity Plate
In the top left corner of the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Module Picker is an area called the Identity Plate. Personalizing the Identity Plate, or “vanity plate,” is not an essential skill but I find it useful especially for novice Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users. Taking control over this minor feature is easy and the results can be really helpful.
Lightroom beginners often make their lives more complicated by creating multiple Lightroom Catalogs. Some beginners create multiple Catalogs on purpose and others create them by accident. Working with multiple Catalogs is a great skill for some sophisticated Lightroom users but it creates a lot of needless confusion when you are first getting started with this software. It adds confusion because most beginners are not keenly aware of which Catalog–which specific .lrcat file–they are currently using.
In my Lightroom training workshops, I make my student’s give their Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog a more meaningful name and I help them create an alias, or shortcut, that leads directly to their Catalog. I firmly believe that eliminating the “which Catalog am in now” question helps when you are first learning to use this program. Personalizing your Identity Plate is one more way to distinguish your Catalog from the factory default!
Related Tutorials:
- Where Should I Keep My Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog
- How to Get Your Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog onto an External Hard Drive
- Getting Started Right: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Setup and Catalog Creation
For more on how to customize Lightroom’s Identity Plate check out this great video from Adobe Evangelist Julieanne Kost.
Filed Under: (01) Getting Started • Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Tutorials
About the Author: David Marx is a digital photography instructor whose engaging teaching style inspires photographers of all skill levels. David is an Adobe Certified Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom Expert. David has led Adobe Photoshop / Photoshop Lightroom seminars and digital photography field workshops for The Rocky Mountain School of Photography, FirstLight Workshops, The American Society of Media Photographers, and the world-renowned Blackberry Farm Resort. To learn more about David's software seminars and field photography workshops, please visit 
Hi David,
I like to use the identity plate a lot as I’m often working on the client site so it looks good. What really frustrates me though is I have to do it on each new catalogue (I use new catalogues for each job) and it drive me a bit mad! D’you know if there is a way of setting it as a default that carries from one catalogue to another in the same way other things like presets do?
Many thanks
Mike
Dear Mike Dodd,
There isn’t a way to make your identity place a global default. By design, it is catalog specific but there is a simple solution. Build a graphical identity plate using Photoshop and save it. Then you can load the same file into each and every catalog! You might have noticed that I have my name and my website for an identity plate in most of my videos. All I did is to create a blank document in photoshop approximately 50 pixels tall by 250 pixels wide then I used the text tool to create two lines of text. I saved this as a jpeg or png file and now I can load it into every Lightroom Catalog with just one click!
–
David Marx
David, this tip you taught me has saved me innumerable headaches. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
Dear Jerry,
You are most welcome! I hope that you and Rhona are having a great summer.
–
David Marx
I tried the “one catalog” approach and it worked well (especially with smart collections). Unfortunately I began getting “low disk space” warnings from Lightroom even though windows 7 said I had plenty of gigabytes free. It appears that the previews take up a huge amount of space that seem to be like phantom files. I finally had to delete my single catalog and the previews and go back to multiple catalog approach. Do you know of a solution ot this problem?