Getting started
Everything you need to begin
An account covers both ways of running it — the Lightroom plug-in and the browser client. Everything below is what that actually involves, so you can tell whether it is for you before you start. Anyone can create an account.
- Two ways in, one accountThe plug-in reads the Lightroom Classic catalogue you already have, on your own desktop. The browser client at photowrite.co/app takes photographs you drop on it and hands back copies. Either way it is one photograph at a time on its way past — your library is never uploaded anywhere.
- Photographs that know where they wereA coordinate is what you want. PhotoWrite starts from one — from a camera with GPS, from a phone, or from a GPX track applied in Lightroom — and it is what lets it name the place and fill the five location fields. A frame without one is set aside by default and costs nothing. You can ask for those to be read anyway, in the plug-in and in the browser: each one spends a scan and comes back with a title, a caption, an extended description and alt text, and no location fields at all, because nothing can say where it was taken.
- An account you set up yourselfCreating one takes an email address and a minute. There is no approval to wait for and nothing to ask anybody for.
- A balance of scans, includedYour account is funded the first time you sign in, so the scans are there before you have finished setting the plug-in up. One look at one photograph spends one. When the balance reaches zero we tell you and scans stop, rather than quietly doing less — and more are bought in packs, from the same page you scan on.
Getting started
Start scanning
Drop photographs on the browser client and it reads every field they already hold, with nothing installed and no account. When you want a scan, create an account from that same page. Questions are welcome either way:
What helps most is knowing whether your photographs are geotagged already, because that is what decides how much PhotoWrite can do for you — a frame with no coordinate can still be read for its words, and that spends a scan and names no place at all. Everything else about what you shoot is interesting rather than required.