r/Lightroom

Please help. I have also posted in the Adobe Lightroom help forum, but I am kind of panicking right now.

So I was using my usual catalogue fine, ran into some lag (normal, my laptop isn't the best) and closed it with the plan to reopen. Now my catalogue file isn't there, it has seemingly disappeared, but the lrdata files still are.

I have multiple backups on multiple devices, but they are all saying "not writable and cannot be opened". I have found an old catalogue that does open fine, so it is not a Lightroom issue (?).

I have searched for what I named the catalogue, although I don't know the specific name, nothing came up but backups which have the same opening problem as before.

I still have all my RAW files, so I could make a new catalogue, but I have over two years of edits on my images, and I don't know if/how to import files into a new catalogue with their edits. I am also a student and have images due in the next two days...which were in that catalogue 🥲.

Any help or suggestions at all are appreciated, thank you.

Hey guys!

In my efforts to become more efficient with LrC, I've started looking for people recording/streaming how they edit photos with live commentary - but I have not been able to find anything like this.

I know of many great tutorial series and different resources, but what I'm specifically looking for now is content of people who really know their stuff showing off their editing workflow in real time. Does anybody even do this?

Thanks for the help!

Hello everyone,
I'm going nuts over here trying to understand what's happening:

https://preview.redd.it/cgdcsf4erg2h1.png?width=286&format=png&auto=webp&s=e6ab53993bf65f3dd2bc2327946a15e440cd5c2f

It seems that my histogram has decided everything white should be tinted pink-ish and for the life of me I cannot understand how to undo this.
There's no preset on, I've created a new Lightroom folder so that I'm sure it's not a preset that's interfering with this.

Did I press a hotkey or accidentally change some setting? Any ideas?

Hello,

Right now I can get Lightroom Premium in the mobile app for 49.99 a year but does anyone know if this comes with lightroom classic or would I need to get the plan on the website for 11.99 a month?

Have a Blessed day, and happy tinkering!!!

Hi all,

I'm a hobbyist photographer who started over a year ago, I do paid studio portrait work very occasionally. I started photography as a means of recording my life, and found I loved how it got me going out to places I never would have gone before. I also have always shot JPG+RAW and probably RAW edit 70% of my keepers.

Up until recently I was using Lightroom CC and had no real complaints with it besides the software occasionally stuttering and lagging, my workflow looked like this:

Take photos > plug SD into computer > upload direct to CC > cull, edit, cull again > download and post finished edits > download full album of keepers and store it on a 5 tb hard drive > copy the backup to google drive.

It was pretty easy, but I have filled my Lightroom CC 1tb storage almost 40% already. I started aggressively culling halfway through the year, but my plan was to just offload the albums I don't need once storage becomes an issue since I have google drive and hard drive backups.

I didn't realize tone curves were available on CC, I know its kind of dumb to have missed that, and outdated info online all said its only on classic, so I went down the classic rabbit hole, bought an SSD, and started trying to use it but found the file management is atrocious, its so much work that I don't even feel like I enjoy this. It feels like a job trying to migrate and manage the files. Every single editing feature that I saw online and learned on classic over the last 2 weeks turns out to just be available on CC too so the editing is literally identical. Does that mean people are on CC purely for organization? I personally find the organization is way more work, which means I'm spending less time shooting and way more time sitting at my desk angry.

I know a lot of people use classic so its just a learning curve just like anything else, but now that I know CC and classic have the same editing functionality, I am wondering what you more experienced folks think about CC vs classic as a hobbyist. I probably take 100-500 photos per shoot (which is photo walks, or vacations) then cull out 80-90% of them. I don't really do or want to do pro paid work or bird photography where I'm shooting thousands of shots per shoot.

Is it still worth learning and toughing it out long term, or will I be better suited by just using CC, harddrive offload/backup, and cloud? I know its been asked before but most CC vs classic conversations are directed towards professionals, which in that case I even know enough to recommend classic, but I'm in between, I have a lot of photos for one year (around 15,000), deeply enjoy this hobby, and hope to continue it indefinitely.

Hello, I was wondering if anyone would know why Lightroom runs so slow on my desktop but is perfectly fine on my phone or my MacBook. My desktop has 32gb of DDR4 and a 3070 graphics card.

When will we get a camera raw update to 18.3.1 for LR &LrC?

Photoshop and Bridge already have it.

Hey everyone, I’m trying to integrate a hardware controller (MX Creative Console) into my Adobe Lightroom Classic workflow and I’ve hit a limitation I can’t quite explain.

In Adobe Lightroom Classic there is a feature in the Develop module called:

“Preview for SDR display” (HDR/SDR rendering preview)

When enabled, it exposes additional SDR-related adjustment controls for how the HDR image is tone-mapped into SDR output.

What works

• Standard Develop controls (Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, etc.) can be mapped and controlled via the hardware controller
• Keyboard/mouse automation works in general for Lightroom

The issue

I cannot find any way to:

• map or access the SDR-specific controls via shortcuts or external controllers
• bind those SDR rendering sliders to hardware inputs
• control them outside of direct mouse interaction in the UI

They appear to be fully UI-accessible, but not exposed to any control surface / mapping layer I can find.

Question

Has anyone managed to access or control these SDR/HDR rendering parameters in Lightroom Classic via:

• MIDI
• control surfaces
• Stream Deck / similar devices
• scripting / automation tools

Or are these controls effectively UI-only with no external API exposure?

Context

I’m trying to build a fully hardware-driven editing workflow (less mouse, more tactile control), and everything in Lightroom maps fine except this SDR rendering section, which seems “isolated” from the rest of the Develop controls.

Howdy, a client I’m providing photos for needs them exported at no more than 10mb. In my custom settings I exported it as a JPG, full size, and went down to 50% quality to keep it just under 10mb. 60% takes it up to 10.3mb. I’m very concerned that I’m not achieving the best possible quality this way. Any callouts or recommendations? If you haven’t guessed, I’m not a professional. Thank you in advance!

Not because the catalog is bad, but because the archive itself becomes fragmented over time.

That was exactly what happened to me after more than 25 years of accumulated media spread across:

• old cameras

• multiple Macs

• external drives

• exports

• backups of backups

• messaging apps like ICQ, MSN and WhatsApp

The problems became increasingly familiar:

• duplicate files propagated across imports and exports

• media without GPS metadata

• missing or inconsistent dates

• folders distributed across multiple drives

• filenames generated by devices and apps that became completely unintelligible over time

Things like:

3A0D38C7-528F-4DA8-840D-F95655F5F879.jpg

At some point, I realized the problem was no longer the catalog itself. The archive had lost structural consistency.

So I built a workflow focused on the filesystem layer itself:

• reorganizing media into a predictable folder structure

• separating duplicates instead of silently deleting them

• recovering missing dates using available file metadata

• isolating unresolved media for manual review

• renaming files into human-readable chronological structures

For example:

France/Ile-de-France/Paris/2015/

France - Ile-de-France - Paris - 20150403110113.000.jpg

If this normalization step is executed before importing media into a catalog system, the files always remain in the same place and consistently aligned with the catalog metadata.

The benchmark eventually processed:

• 363,575 media files

• 2.1 TB of archives

• 25 years of accumulated media

• multiple drives and fragmented libraries

• 392 hours of long-running execution

The goal was never to replace Lightroom or other DAM systems.

The goal was to make the archive itself understandable again.

If people are interested, I can share more details about the workflow and structure I ended up using.

Hi everybody.

I need advice about what GPU to buy. Im doing some daily work on lightroom to edit photos of people running. I have a basic setup that always worked for me, but now i need some more power to finish the editing faster.

My PC is a Ryzen 5600g, GIGABYTE B550M DS3H board and 32gb 3200mhz RAM.

I don't play on PC so i never had need for a dedicated GPU until now.

The workflow is mostly basic editing and then exporting of thousands of photos (8k average) with no need for the AI stuff for the moment.

And im kind of on a budget. I'm planning on buying a new camera this week and i want to jump to a Mac later this year.

So my questions are:

- A 8gb memory GPU will be enough for that work?

- If i dont need to use AI stuff, there's difference between Radeon and Nvidia?

- If yes, a 16gb 9060 XT will be better than a 8gb 5060?

Since the last update the process runs but nothing is selected - anyone know of a fix?

Lightroom Classic version 15.3

Hey I was wondering what everyones (professional) opinion is on the std Adobe Color profile. It looks so flat, coming from a Fujifilm (Provia) user. Although I feel like it's more 'neutral' and probably better for commerical use.

r/Lightroom, I’ve come for your wisdom.

I am an undergrad TA for my college’s band program, and I’m pretty close with my professor/boss whom I’ve known with for 3 years. We were joking around when I asked him if there was any work I could help him with over the summer, and he sarcastically said “learn Lightroom so I don’t have to hire a photographer,” so I said I will. And he had the GAUL to laugh. In my face. And say that I, as an English major, would have no reason to learn Lightroom. Humiliating.

I need to get him back. I think it would be a really funny bit if I learned Lightroom before our event in July just so that I can rub it in his face. How hard would this be? How easy is it to learn Lightroom?

I just bought a brand new Mac Studio so I expected Lightroom Classic to be screaming fast, but I still find some things lagging. My biggest gripe is when I switch photos or start a new mask, sometimes the adjustment sliders won't highlight when I mouse over them. My editing technique is to mouse over the slider and use the arrow keys to move it up or down, but that obviously doesn't work when the sliders won't highlight. Any suggestions? I've tried disabling/enabling the GPU in the Performance tab of Preferences and deleted a handful of plugins I wasn't using.

Computer

Mac Studio with M4 Max chip

16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine

64GB unified memory

1TB SSD storage

Edited to clarify I'm using Lightroom Classic.

UPDATE: Things seem to be working better and while I make a few changes I think the one that made the difference was changing my import build previews from Standard to 1:1. I zoom in a lot so I think the delay in interface controls was due to Lightroom trying to build 1:1 previews on the fly.

HI, HELP! which should I get??? Im old school Hist Process photo background and I w digital I never needed real Post processing.

BUT I need to use either classic or basic for 50 portraits that need to have same background color balance. AND whatever it takes to make portraits really nice. besides batch background work, they really need help looking great... and some skin work, some isolated sharpening maybe, and other normal things. But not over processed fake looking. All PICS looked fantastic in camera but really bad on Mac book pro in iPhoto and Pixelmator Pro . are all RAW/jpg and shot with Nikon Z6iii body and prime portrait lenses- TY

Hi all, I have about 150 photos, and for every 10-20 photos, LRC will randomly crash without warning. I am running 5800X and 32gb ram. My CPU is 97-98% when exporting and I am not doing anything else during the export. How do i fix this? My drivers from Nvidia is latest.

I’m using Lr mobile on my 2020 iPad Pro running iPad OS 26.4.2. I connect a card reader and import images using the files option. This has always been my workflow but now every time I go to import images, it’s taking forever to import. When I tap the cloud icon it only says however many imports are pending.

I’ve rebooted the app many times, I’ve done full power downs and boot ups of the iPad and nothing helps.

On top of the importing issue, I cannot access my library of images. I can see them but when I try to make edits, all the editing controls are greyed out. I’ve posted about this in the Adobe support forums but nobody was able to help with my issues. The importing issues is for photos only. I don’t know what is causing the bottleneck and this last import was only 4-5 images.

I did read something that said go to Lightroom.adobe.com on a desktop and go to All Photos then scroll down to the Sync Error issue folder to see if any images were in there and delete them and that should resolve the imports pending issue. So I did all that and that folder had 4 images from 2023 in there. I deleted them and came back to my iPad and that did not resolve the issue. The imports are still stuck pending and I cannot edit any already imported images. The iPad has plenty of free storage space too.

I only use Lr Mobile on the iPad. I do not have Lr on a desktop. I really don’t know what to do or try at this point.

Suggestions???

Hi, I’m having issues with speed using servers over ethernet on macs.

The setup is 2.5Gbe straight from the server to different m series macs, I know the speed is capping bc i get the full 280~ megabytes a sec when copying files to the server or to the local drive on different macs.

In LrC I only get about 30 megabytes a sec, when running imports and about 3 or 6 if I’m doing culling.

Things I tried:
- Add mode with no copying files anywhere else
- Catalog is on local drive, as well as cache with 10gb of storage set in preferences
- Previews are set as embedded on initial imports and work well in grid view but on the E view in library get slow after a couple minutes
- If i set standard size previews it gets a bit faster but still slow for culling, compared to when I use local drive for all images

Does anyone else use LrC with servers on offices where many people need to access different folders and files from different dates off the same server and gets good speed while using LrC? Is it normal for LrC to get only 10% of the available speed with this setup? What should I change to get faster culling? Do I need to completely get off LrC and use aftershoot/narrative for good culling times?

Thanks in advance, sorry if I missed any technical details about the setup, just let me know so I can check and update the post.

I'm collaborating with A on modifying images in a catalog A sent me. A is using a PC and I'm using a Mac. I unzipped the catalog and then clicked on the catalog to open it and received this message:

unable to open catalog

So I changed the Sharing & Permissions in the folder to Read & Write on my User. Only then I was able to open the catalo and modify the images. After modifying them I zipped the catalog file (.lrcat) and sent it back to A.

The problem is that when A opened the catalog the images had been duplicated. The originals without modifications plus my modified images. I would like to know if anyone has been through the same situation and how you managed to solved it.

Thanks!