Big Note is a very simple free plugin which adds a couple of custom field to the Metadata panel.
- One lets you add notes about the picture. You can store any text in the field, and it can also be searched by smart collections.
- The second is a drop down box with predefined choices.
I am cautious about encouraging people to enter custom metadata in Lightroom. The custom fields’ values are stored only in the catalogue and are never written to the images’ XMP files or included in files exported from LR. That’s good in the sense of privacy, but it’s bad in that the data is trapped inside the catalogue. So I do not generally recommend the use of custom fields if you can’t support them yourself and don’t understand the limitations.
The plugin code is unencrypted and might help you learn bits of Lua, LR’s scripting language. You don’t have to know much about coding if, for example, you just want to add another custom field to your catalogue. But to learn more about LR plugins and scripting, see the LR SDK and particularly the reference manual.
Big Note is free and will do the limited job for which it’s designed. But it is totally unsupported, so please don’t ask for help using it.