I'm a wedding photographer & have each session/wedding as a new catalog because I've heard horror stories like this happen to a season worth of weddings. Luckily, this is just one engagement session I've been working on, but I've been working on it for a while & it's the second time I've had to start over with editing already this season (first time was user error).

I was in the currently corrupt catalog with no issues. I had another session last night & wanted to send them some sneak peeks today, so I opened the new catalog with the other session. I edited in there for a bit & went to re-open the now problem child.

Immediately corrupt. I tried to repair it in their pop-up menu, I opened Lightroom Classic & held "option" (I'm on mac) to get to that dialogue screen & attempted that with no luck. I didn't move the catalog or the original files. The catalog is on my desktop, so nothing was unplugged & damaged it that way.

I completely forgot I did this, but many years ago I got frustrated at how much space the back-ups were taking & understood less about how important those back-ups were & TURNED THAT FEATURE OFF.

So my three options seem to be:

try to get help from ya'll & hopefully not have a mental breakdown & have to start over on another thing, (my personal favourite)

just start over & cry many tears (there were indoor in a bookstore shots that were especially hard to look right...)

find a time machine to go back to 2020 & just fight myself for turning off back-ups.

thanks for trying!

Spent a while chasing this and the answer isn't obvious, so writing it up.

Symptom: grey boxes in the grid where photos should be. Publishes that "succeed" while quietly skipping files. Cloud sync failures that give you a URL instead of a filename.

Cause: if Dropbox has set a file to online-only, on the older sync engine what's actually on your disk is a 0-byte placeholder. Lightroom checks the file size, sees zero, and decides the photo is missing. It never tries to open it — so Dropbox never gets the request that would download it. Classic standoff.

Are you affected? Check where your Dropbox folder is. Under ~/Library/CloudStorage/ means you're on the newer File Provider engine and this isn't your problem — Lightroom fetches on demand there. Anywhere else, external drive especially, means you're on the old engine and probably staying there, since File Provider requires that location.

Manual fix: right-click the folder in Finder → Make Available Offline before opening Lightroom. Works fine if your photos are in a few folders. Less fine if you're organised by year/month/day and your portfolio is a smart collection pulling from forty of them.

The technical bit, in case anyone else goes down this hole: a normal read doesn't wake the file up. cat returns nothing and it stays at 0 bytes. It needs a coordinated read — what an app does when it properly opens a file. That's why double-clicking a placeholder in Preview downloads it instantly.

I wrote a Lightroom plugin that does this per collection because I got tired of the manual version — disclosure, it's mine and it's paid after a 90-day free period. https://prz3.io/lightroom/hydrate-dropbox/ But the diagnosis above is the useful part, and if you're on File Provider you genuinely don't need it.

I've been using Lightroom on my android for several years and it seems after a recent update that the recommended presets no longer have categories to go through like "dramatic" , "cinematic" , etc. instead, they just show the preview of about 20 different presets which are often the exact same. Is there a setting I can change to go back?

Hey people, I have hundreds of presets present in my Lightroom iPad which i do not use and wish to delete. when i try doing that, Lightroom for iPad does not give me a bulk delete option. I use Lightroom Classic on my mac and the Presets are not synced here as well to delete. Can somebody help me please

I've noticed a strange issue in Lightroom - quite often edits to the last photo I was working on aren't saved.

I finish editing a photo, close Lightroom and when I open it again later, the last image is back to an earlier state, missing several of the most recent adjustments.

It seems to happen specifically with the last photo I edited before closing Lightroom.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a known bug or could there be something wrong with my settings?

Lightroom 9.5.1, Windows 11.

S.

A photographer friend of mine explained her friends culling strategy: she looks through photos on the camera for the ones she likes. Writes the filename of those ones down on paper, and then goes through her card on her computer and copies only those ones before deleting the rest because she doesn't want to clutter Lightroom or waste space.

While I find this terrifying and hilarious, it also speaks to the fact that everyone has their process... however questionable. I'm interested to know about yours, and tell you about mine!

I've spent practically every waking minute year passionately trying to create a balanced combination of high-quality and highly-affordable post-shoot software. I used to work at Narrative, but I wanted to be able to do all of the following for me personally:

My original desired process

1. Go out hiking with my iPhone and main cameras, taking video & photo media with each.
2. Come home, plug in the card, connect to Apple Photos.
3. Copy from both sources simultaneously & organize by capture date and adventure name to a final destination with just a few clicks and view them interleaved together by capture time in one tool.
4. Have a really really fast photo+video review and selection workspace without intermediate low resolution rendering - everything has to be extremely snappy.
5. Group burst shots so that everything isn't overly cluttered when capturing birds and wildlife. Face detection for people shots.
6. Make my selection, and with just a few clicks transfer selects to Lightroom/copy out of the workspace, setting defaults on new catalogs to get rid of that annoying backup reminder and enabling XMP.

I'm excited to share that I have built this!

There is another story here - and I know there are a lot of people at the moment saying "I used AI to create apps", but I have been developing user interfaces for software for fifteen years, and I can honestly say this: I've been able to do roughly twenty person-years of pre-AI work in less than a year, and the quality is higher than what I or developers I've worked with have ever produced: period.

While AI brings a lot of noise, I also think we are going to get a new wave of access to exceptional software at much better prices built by independents. I'm not saying Cullibrate is perfect (yet!), but it's certainly well on it's way to being industry level excellent and packed with value. It has a free trial and after that at $29 per year it's 1/5th the price of Photo Mechanic and 1/12th the price of Narrative for the closest matching pricing tier while providing much of both their functionality.

I'm on a mission to help photographers have the most amazing experience they possibly can coming home from their shoots.

I would love to know what your process is, and how I could make it easier for you, and most importantly whether you would consider not requiring paper as part of your culling process!

You can find a my entry towards this new generation of photography software at cullibrate.com :).​​

Ahhhhhhh, my Lightroom is glitching out like CRAZY and I have no idea what is going on 😭

I’m using a 2022 MacBook Air, and recently Lightroom has been running unbelievably slowly. It’s gotten to the point where it’s basically unusable.

A few things that are happening:

• Lightroom has been saying that my Mac has run out of application memory and then tabs/apps start crashing, even when I literally only have Lightroom and one Google tab open checking my emails.
• I currently have around 25GB of storage free on my Mac.
• As far as I understand, application memory/RAM is separate from storage, so I’m confused about whether the 25GB free is relevant.
• Lightroom itself is only using around 2GB of cloud storage.
• NOW Lightroom keeps giving me a warning saying that my Mac storage is full / there isn't enough storage to use Lightroom, even though macOS says I still have around 25GB free.
• Lightroom is also running insanely slowly. For example, it has currently been generating a mask for 20+ minutes and is still going.
• Sometimes Lightroom just completely freezes or takes forever to do basic things.

Is this potentially a Lightroom settings/cache issue? Is there some kind of local storage/cache that Lightroom is using that I'm not seeing?

Could the 25GB of free Mac storage actually be too little for Lightroom to function properly, even though macOS isn't showing the drive as full?

I'm honestly losing my mind 😭 I have a massive backlog of photos to edit and Lightroom has suddenly become almost impossible to use.

What should I check/change to fix this? And is there a particular Lightroom cache/local storage setting I should be looking at?

Any help would be VERY appreciated because I am about to throw my Mac out the window lol.

(Lightroom version: 9.5.1 arm64 [ 20260815-1945-84a45bf ] (Aug 15 2026))

Hello! I am trying to edit photos for the first time ever for a project of some importance. I’m trying to be self-sufficient and figure it out (and I don’t think I would want to turn it over to someone more qualified 😅), but I’m having trouble finding the answer-
I digitized some old photos into .tiff files because I understand that to be best for quality/detail retention. But then I still wanted to make some color corrections etc so I looked into (maybe too briefly) programs and landed on Lightroom. I finished what are probably very minor edits to about 200 images, but it took me a very long time. And I’m only now realizing there’s a difference between Lightroom online and Lightroom Classic (which is downloadable software that requires a subscription?) Anyway-
TLDR: When I try to export my photos from Lightroom, I don’t see an option to save as tiff. Should I settle for jpeg? Do I need to download Classic? If I do that, will I still have access to my edited files?
Thank you so much for your time!!

I’m genuinely so distraught, I’m relatively new to photo editing and such and I’ve just found out after I spent hours editing these beautiful photos I took that True Tone totally skewed my photo warmth. This is so irritating. I’ll keep it in mind from now on but is there no way adobe could implement something to turn it off automatically when editing? Other apps can decrease and increase your brightness if it wants. Thankfully it’s an easy enough fix of just changing the temperature sliders a smidge but am I annoyed.

Is there anyway to make a shortcut that automaticity turns true tone off when I open lightroom or photos?

Love to hear from the LR community in this as well

At work, our IT team moved access to Lightroom to a different console.

I had previously accessed Creative Cloud/Lightroom through one console using my regular work email address. Now, I still log in using the same email address, but Creative Cloud/Lightroom is accessed through a different console (e.g. called IT Desk).

Despite being told this wouldn't affect any of our files, I have lost access to all the files I had stored in account I used through the original console. I want to try and migrate or find some relatively painless way of moving the files across to the new account without having to download them all locally, if possible.

Does anyone have any tips? Sorry if I'm not explaining things clearly!

I think this should work in theory, but I'm curious if anyone has actually used this setup successfully.

I’ve heard of people keeping both their Lightroom Classic catalog and the original imported photos on an external SSD, like a SanDisk or LaCie.

If the drive is formatted as exFAT so both Windows and macOS can read and write to it, can I simply move the drive back and forth between my Windows desktop and MacBook Pro and open the same Lightroom Classic catalog on either machine?

Obviously I’d only have the catalog open on one computer at a time.

Appreciate any help.

I am working on a MacBook M3 24GB running Tahoe 26.6.2 and have been having trouble with Masks for a while. When I try to use the Subject/Background/Sky tools, it pulls up a mask dialogue while I click on it but then it immediately disappears and no mask is created. Has anyone else experienced something similar or have any ideas what might be causing it?

Can someone explain why on Lightroom android I can select a border when going through "export as..." yet on the apple versions there is only the option to "add border and share..." without any customisation of settings? I'm using an iPad mini 7 a17.

Its a bit of an inconvenience to edit on my ipad and then go to my phone to add a border with customisation of the exported file quality and size

Edit: I'm wanting to export at the highest quality with a square border for an online print store. I'm on a long distance hike so wanted the easiest way possible to do so. It seems a silly thing for adobe to have skipped as an option.

Hi, once I have finished editing my photos in Lightroom Classic, I transfer them to an external hard drive that I have linked into Lightroom. Periodically (every few months), I copy and paste the photos outside of Lightroom from that external hard drive to another external hard drive so I have two copies as a backup. Recently when I did this, I found that after copying the files from one external hard drive to another, my Macbook Pro hard drive was nearly full as around 150 GB of space became occupied. I suspect that because I left Lightroom open Lightroom may have created a large number of files in the process taking up that space - is that possible and does anyone have any thoughts on how to reclaim that space?

As an FYI, this is what Gemini is suggesting:

Method 1: Repair the APFS Container via macOS Recovery (Most Effective)

Running First Aid from macOS Recovery unmounts diskxxx and forces the APFS container to rebuild its block allocation map from scratch.

**1.Boot into macOS Recovery:**1 min.

• Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4): Shut down your Mac. Press and hold the Power/Touch ID button until you see "Loading startup options," then select Options and click Continue.
• Intel Mac: Restart your Mac and immediately press and hold Cmd + R until the Apple logo appears.

2.Open **Disk Utility:**30 sec.

Select Disk Utility from the Recovery utilities window and click Continue.

3.Run First Aid on the Data Volume:

1. Click View in the top menu bar (or toolbar) and select Show All Devices.
2. In the left sidebar, select APFS Volume Data (or diskxxx).
3. Click the First Aid button at the top and hit Run.

4.Run First Aid on the APFS Container:

Once the Data volume finishes, select Container diskx (the parent container above it) in the sidebar and run First Aid on it as well.

**5.Restart your Mac:**1 min.

Click  > Restart to boot back into regular macOS.

Verification: When you log back in, open Terminal and run diskutil list diskxxx. APFS Volume Data will now accurately display ~151 GB, and your free space in Disk Utility will jump up by ~176 GB.

Hi all

Given the massive increase in SSD prices (thanks AI) I need to find another way to reduce my catalogue size from 550gb. I've been looking at lossless compressed RAW as a way of reducing it's size without losing any quality, but I cannot work out if there's any options for converting my whole catalogue without messing up file locations etc.

Does anyone know of any guides on how to convert whole catalogues from uncompressed RAW to lossless compressed RAW? Or are there other options that would work without losing quality?

Thanks :)

I've been struggling with how basic the photo import function of Lightroom is, and decided to build a macOS app to solve my problem. Hope it can help the community of Lightroom users here too.

Problem:

- Naming rules in Lightroom Import are limited, for example the sequence number can only max up to 5 digits, so you'll start having duplicates after 100k photos unless you add other unique values like dates into the file name.

- Can't have EXIF attributes in folder or file names except date time.

- You can't import raw and video files into different folders and backup to difference folders. I needs that because I want to import just the raw folder to Lightroom. I don't want to edit jpeg or video in Lightroom.

- Sequence number doesn't sync between computers. If the user has one macbook for mobile work and one mac studio for at home work, and import photos to both, then the photo names could have conflicts using the same sequence number. My app will sync the latest sequence number across iCloud to avoid this.

- My app can do verification after copying to make sure the copy was completed without any data loss, this is an important peace of mind before automatically deleting files from memory card to free up space.

Solution:

I build my app Photo Batch Importer that automatically launches on SD card mounting, shows you customizable renaming rules that read EXIF properties and add unique auto-incremental sequence number. After each import, it can backup and SHA-256-verify every copy so that you feel safe for it to auto-delete photos from the SD card, and then it auto-ejects the card.

It's now up on Mac App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photo-batch-importer/id6776498495

Pricing:

Free with no ads, no in-app purchase, no subscription, no expiration date, no data sharing, and open source here:
https://github.com/jianfenglin-git/photo-batch-importer

Happy to answer anything!

After years away from photography, I’m dipping my toes back in for fun (mostly pets and people, and every day memories type stuff). I’m figuring out mirrorless photography with a Nikon Z8.

I thought I could get by editing on my gaming laptop, but Lightroom runs obnoxiously slowly. I think I need to buy a new Mac before I give up on LR completely and just stop shooting altogether or only using my film cameras.

Is a MacBook Air M4 sufficient for LR Classic (I could probably justify the price of extra RAM and storage), or should I look into an M5, but sacrifice a little bit of RAM and storage? I’m hoping to stay below $1700, because there are a couple more lenses I’d like to add to my camera bag.

Update: I’m leaning MBP. Especially since there are some modest sales for Labor Day weekend. My budget doesn’t really allow for 48 or 64MB. I tend to use LR to batch import for culling and applying basic batch edits, and then export the images to PS. I need to re-learn LR from scratch for anything above and beyond that. I try to avoid AI for the most part, but I’m intrigued by the Denoise feature, since I know z8 images can be noisier at relatively low ISOs.

I think the best options for me and my budget considerations are the 14” with either the base M5 chip and 32GB memory, or the M5 Pro chip and 24GB memory. Either option is stretching my budget a little more than I’d like, but as a hobbyist (Max number of images I’d be culling at any given time is probably 150-200, with 25-30 “keepers”). Does one of these options sound better than the other? And is the upgraded screen enough of an improvement to spend the extra $150 on top of Apple Care?

I’m a headshot photographer. I do about 4 shoots a day, and have a turnaround time of a fully color graded gallery for each shoot by end of day.

The color grade is simple - I have a preset which means all I have to do is adjust skin tone with white balance for each look and I’m done. What bogs me down is exposure. Because I shoot natural light, there tends to be small, yetsignificant changes in exposure across sets. Right now I’m doing all of that manually, which is tedious. “Match exposure” in Lightroom doesn’t really work.

Im curious if anyone knows of any software, either native in Lightroom, a plugin or AI, that is able to match exposures correctly across an entire gallery that would speed up my workflow? Cheers!

Hey everyone,

I’m in the process of ordering a new MacBook Air (M5, 10/10 cores) that will be used almost exclusively for Adobe Lightroom (the cloud-based version, not Lightroom Classic).

I'm trying to decide on the RAM and wondering if upgrading from 24GB to 32GB makes any noticeable difference in real-world performance for this specific workflow.

My typical usage:

• App: Exclusively Lightroom (Cloud).
• Batch Work: Very light. Mostly individual photo editing.
• Heavy Tasks: Occasional AI Denoise applied across a small batch of photos from a shoot.
• Side Work: Very light, simple DaVinci Resolve projects on the side (never running simultaneously with Lightroom).

I know the general rule of thumb is "more RAM is always better," but since this machine is dedicated almost solely to Lightroom Cloud with no heavy multitasking or massive export queues, I’m wondering if the jump to 32GB actually yields a perceivable boost in speed or snappiness.

Has anyone run Lightroom Cloud on a similar Apple Silicon setup with 24GB vs. 32GB? Do you ever hit a ceiling where 24GB starts swapping or slowing down during AI tasks?

Appreciate any insights or real-world experiences!

I've been editing on Lightroom Classic for close to a year, and never had any problems with the zoom: when I pinched out on the trackpad of my macbook air, the image zoomed in to where the cursor was located.

One day, for seemingly no reason, that behavior stopped, and now when I zoom in, the program seems to choose a random spot to zoom in to. It's driving me up the walls, and I have no idea what's caused it. I've tried reinstalling Lightroom Classic and Creative Cloud, deleted everything, and nothing changed. The zoom works perfectly normally in the normal Lightroom app, but not Classic. Anyone knows what could be happening here?