If you shoot with old manual lenses on your modern digital camera, as I do, you’ve probably noticed that Lightroom doesn’t show up any EXIF information for the lens when you import the images. That’s pretty obvious, since vintage lenses usually have no electronic parts in them at all. The problem is, Lightroom doesn’t allow you to add this missing information to your files later, either.

LensTagger is a Lightroom plugin that allows you to add specific lens metadata to your images without ever leaving the app. It works pretty well, and includes all lens-related information such as lens name, focal length, maximum aperture, actual aperture, and more. Best of all, you can save presets for the different lenses you shoot with, and apply the edits to multiple files with a single click. And as a nice bonus feature, you can also add film-related metadata, including film brand, stock, speed, and more.

If you like to have all your pictures nicely tagged for, say, sharing to Flickr, LensTagger is definitely a great solution.

The images above were both shot with the venerable Canon nFD 50mm f/1.8 lens on the Sony A7 II camera. Click on them to view them on Flickr, including lens metadata.

LensTagger requires ExifTool, which is available on both Windows and OS X. It was developed by Dirk Essl and it’s donation-ware. If you enjoy using it, do send a few bucks his way.