Stealing Lightroom Presets?

The other day, a little bookmarklet was introduced.  All you had to do was add it to your browser’s toolbar and then when you were on the page of a flickr photo edited in Lightroom…you could press the bookmarklet and swipe the preset used on that photo.  Seemed innocent enough, I wasn’t worried.  So I tested it out.

I first tried it on my own flickr photos that I knew I had edited in Lightroom and it didn’t work.  So I went into a group on Flickr that was specifically for Lightroom images only and tried it there…it worked (on some photos).  So I swiped a few presets, tried them out and wasn’t overly impressed.  My own personal presets were much better than what I had grabbed on Flickr.  Then I realized why people couldn’t take my presets.  I edit in Lightroom and then open those images up in Photoshop and add my watermark there and save a copy.  Seems that if you re-save in photoshop then the Lightroom data is gone.

Cool.

So I wasn’t going to panic.  Hide your exif data or just re-save in photoshop and hide the Lightroom data only.  No biggie.

I sell Lightroom presets at Pink Ink Studios.  So I should be one of the people upset about the bookmarklet…but I’m not.

Besides, mine were much better than anything I found on flickr anyway, and those are the ones I’ll continue to use.

And now the bookmarklet is no longer available.  Someone threatened legal action from another country so the creator took it down.  If you want this little tool, I’m sure someone somewhere is going to come up with another one shortly.  It’s just too easy for someone to do.