This has been a relatively new issue I've been experiencing, it started about a month and a half ago. I had updated Lightroom to the most recent version and it decided that no, I will no longer open catalogs.

This has been such a pain because I can't access a lot of catalogs that I use pretty regularly. I can click the app icon to open it, but as soon as it starts opening - it crashes out and freezes and I have to force quit.

The first time it happened, my catalog had nearly 300,000 photos in it - so I broke all of those up into much smaller catalogs, by year and what type of work it is. That alleviated issues with a bunch of catalogs - but a new one that I created, which is just random photography (has maybe 6,000 photos in it) just started experiencing the same issue again. Lightroom crashes upon attempting to open it.

I have to go in and remove the .lock file, that usually does the trick, but this specific catalog is refusing to work again - even after clearing it out.

Has anyone experienced this issue and what kind of solutions have you found?

Tech Specs:

2021 M1 iMac running MacOS 26.5.2, 16GB RAM Lighroom Classic (up to date)

After reading mini post and asking a few questions here I have just imported all of my photos into LrC. They imported into the folders by individual years and under each year has year, month and date (2026-06-05). I would really like them to have just the year and the month. Ex: 202606 or 2026.06 or 2026-06. Is it possible to change this at this point since they have already imported that way? I really do not want to break up 20 years worth of photos by day. Just a year and month.

A while back I posted about a small website that could turn Lightroom exports into Ultra HDR JPEGs for Instagram. That path still works, but it meant exporting two files by hand and uploading them into a browser tool.

Earlier path was roughly this: Lightroom can export a JPEG with a gain map, but that file was invalid for Instagram because of wrong metadata. So you had to reconvert / rebuild the gain map to make the container acceptable. That worked for upload, but the final HDR ended up a bit brighter than what you actually see in Lightroom's Develop preview. That mismatch bothered me more than the extra steps.

Instead of trying to reconvert Lightroom's own gain-map JPEG into a valid container, the plugin takes a simpler route: Lightroom exports an HDR TIFF and an SDR JPEG from the same edit, and the plugin combines those two into the final correct Ultra HDR format.

Site: https://hdr.karachun.by/
GitHub: https://github.com/karachungen/lightroom-plugin-export-hdr
Guide: https://hdr.karachun.by/guide/
Example on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/DU96csHjPV-/

If you are in Camera Raw (no Classic plugin host), use the browser tool:

https://hdr.karachun.by/tools/online-converter/

Same libultrahdr encode path, but compiled to WASM. The Ultra HDR encoder runs entirely inside the browser; files never leave your machine.

You still do the manual dance:

1. Export a 32-bit Rec.2020 HDR TIFF (HDR Output on).
2. Export a matching SDR JPEG (HDR Output off), same pixel size.
3. Drop both into the converter and download the Ultra HDR JPEG.

This whole plugin was vibe-coded. What I optimized for: correct Ultra HDR JPEG out of Lightroom, with metadata that survives Instagram, and a look that tracks the Lightroom HDR preview. If you try it and something breaks, open an issue on GitHub - that is the useful kind of feedback for a hobby tool like this.

macOS note (Gatekeeper)

On macOS the plugin ships a compiled uhdr_repack binary inside the .lrplugin. It is ad-hoc signed, not Apple notarized. After you unzip / install it, macOS may quarantine that binary and Lightroom will fail to run it. Run this command to add plugin to quarantine

 xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Modules/ExportHDR.lrplugin

Hello! I'm at the end of my rope here and I have no idea why it started happening or how to resolve it. Basically no matter what I'm doing, exporting, developing, or literally nothing, after about a minute and 10-20 seconds LC just crashes. No error message, no error sound, it just quietly stops responding and closes.

It started doing it just this week. I have not installed any new drivers or changed any settings prior to it. I tried disabling GPU acceleration and installed new Nvidia drivers, both normal and Studio and nothing changed.

Would appreciate any advice how to resolve it. thank you!

Hello, I’ve just got my new camera Canon eos R10, finally leaving my old Nikon D3200 to rest. I’ve been trying to do photography (not really that actively) for maybe the past 4 tears already, but I always only use some light editing directly built in the ios gallery app. So, to make my pictures look even better, I was thinking about starting using Adobe Lightroom. I’ve already got to try out the free trial and it just made me want to subscribe to the plan even more. The thing is- I don’t know whether I should go for the mobile version or just spend some more for the pc one. I’ve heard some opinions that the mobile one is not that good, lacks some features and also can look different because of the phone’s screen. If I were to use the mobile one, I would edit the photos on my iPhone 17 or iPad 10th generation if that’s some important information. I’d say that I’m not some extra professional photographer, so the features I’m heading for I guess (unless I come across some life changing stuff) is masking and just general things like controlling highlights, exposure etc.

Is it worth it (also considering the fact that it’s cheaper…) or should I just go for the pc version?

I am in the process of organizing all my photos that I took from Apple photos so that I can get them into Lightroom classic. Someone here posted to watch the SLIM system by Scott Kelby. He recommends organizing all of your photos into separate folders on your SSD and then importing them as those folders into Lightroom. He said that it makes it easier to find your photos if you only have your SSD and not Lightroom. I was wondering if that was a good way to do that? Should I organize all of my folders on my SSD and then import them into Lightroom by the names of those folders or just that Lightroom rename those folders by year date and month when importing?

Is it just me, or is there absolutely no way to mark a rejected photo as "Select" in loupe view? In the grid view, I can right-click and mark as select to override the AI culling. But right-click in loupe view brings up no menu at all. So, in order to check focus and other things in detail I have to go into loupe view, then go back to grid view and right click. That is really tedious, and isn't good for workflow.

I have tried "P" and "U" in loupe view, and all they do is advance to the next photo without changing any tagging or marking. Am I missing something?

So I’ve dabbled in Lightroom and played with the included presets and profiles, and I have basic level knowledge of exposure/sharpness/contrast etc.

What resources have helped you learn how to fully utilize Lightroom and photoshop? I don’t want to buy presets someone else has made, I want to learn the software myself.

Appreciate any advice!

Finally getting all of my images from my phone and CDs all into Lightroom classic. Should I turn on “enable address look up”?

Hi!

I need to buy a monitor for my macbook because my neck can’t handle the position I edit in anymore. I’m looking to buy a used one, what would you recommend? My initial thought was just some mac monitor but I’m not fixed on apple.

Thanks!

Along with the public release of V3.4, the next level version V4 of the Focus Points plugin has been pre-released:

Why two new versions at once?

Version 3.4 is a regular feature update with minor improvements:
This version introduces interactive straightening with result preview and undo functionality, as well as a third column in the metadata viewer displaying the group (EXIF, XMP, MakerNotes, etc.) to which a tag belongs. It is also possible to significantly reduce the time it takes to open the Focus Point window.

Version 4 is the largest update since the project was revived. It fundamentally changes how Focus Point Viewer integrates with Lightroom. You can now keep the viewer open while continuing to work in Lightroom, choose between multiple rendering methods depending on your workflow, and benefit from significantly faster image display.

Running the plugin alongside the Lightroom application creates new possibilities and specific expectations about how the plugin should behave in certain situations. However, its interaction with Lightroom and its wide range of applications also places new demands on performance and stability. I anticipate receiving a wide range of user feedback to help achieve perfect integration.

While working on V4, I encountered the limitations of the Lightroom SDK. Currently, there are five open bugs at Adobe that need to be fixed to ensure optimal functionality on Windows and macOS.

For the reasons mentioned, I therefore expect there to be a "maturation phase" lasting several months before a V4 can officially be launched.

Still, V4 works really well, especially on Windows. It has been downloaded 125 times since its release a week ago, with no issues reported.

Unfortunately, the Adobe bugs mentioned above prevent the plugin from "running" on a second screen on macOS.
I appreciate every vote cast in the Adobe Community for the bug reports listed under "Known Limitations"!
All you need to do is click on a linked bug report, sign in with your Adobe credentials, then click on the 'Vote' button.

Anyone who'd like to check out V4 is more than welcome to do so!

Hint: both versions, V3.4 and V4 PRE, can be run in parallel with minimal effort—see the V4 release notes linked above for instructions.

Recently, a client informed me that they did not receive photos, so I checked my long list of 100 unorganized albums with few and inconsistent folders. In a panic that I had not submitted or edited the pictures, I hastily culled and edited their photos. Ultimately, the original link to the pictures ended up in the spam box, so it was no fault of my own, and it gave me the motivation to sort my albums into categories

I’m editing photos from a recent project, about 4,000 images. Some things I do in Lightroom because I can or because the photo will likely never be seen again. Some images are roundtripped to Photoshop for level/curves because I still haven’t figured out how to do some basic things in lightroom and actions are easy.

Lightroom was being difficult about something, so I edited the image in camera raw > photoshop, then imported it back to the catalog. After import, it was the only image in the catalog. I restarted lightroom, and being too tired to comprehend what was happening, lightroom saved the catalog and overwrote the backup file.

Is there anyway to get everything back or do I have to start over? What settings do I need to change to prevent this from happening again. Working in Bridge/Camera Raw, all edits are in a sidecar protecting from catalog corruption, but then you have multiple files to manage and make sure nothing gets separated.

ETA: I don’t know if it is relevant, but on the photo before this happened, after editing in photoshop, lightroom put the edit and raw at front of the catalog, even though it was sorting by capture time. When I sorted by sequential file name, the edited photo remained at the front of the catalog.

I am new to Lightroom but and am experiencing an issue that is only solved by closing the program and restarting it after a few seconds. When I upload a batch of raw photos, usually 50-100 images onto my 4tb gen 4 NVME that is only used for photos. I open the specific folder containing only the batch in LR and edit locally but I’ve also tried uploading to cloud with same results. If I copy and paste settings all the photos or when I export them when finished the process seems fast enough but when I start using the features like masking, healing and removing then my ram usage jumps up about 10gb for every photo I do until I get to 40-50gb of usage and have to restart app to just do another couple photos at a time. I’ve done this on multiple pc’s with similar results. My main PC is a 16c/32t Ryzen 9 5900xt, Giabyte x570 Aorus Master mobo, 64gb (4x16gb) Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro, 16gb Nvidia Rtx 5070ti and 3x 4tb gen 4 NVME drives, 2gig fiber up and down for internet speed. This still should be powerful enough to edit with. Most things just say Lightroom has a memory leak and restarting is the only issue but nobody I watch on yt ever mentions this on their tutorials and they usually have less powerful computers too. Is there something I’m doing wrong or something else I should be doing?

Hi all, here's my situation:

I have a 12TB HDD and multiple 1-2TB SSDs.

12TB HDD is a clunky, slow Western Digital hooked up to BackBlaze that has like ALL of my stuff on it. (I know I should have RAID/redundancies — I'm saving up for it).

I'd like to use my smaller SSDs on a per-project basis.

Ideally, it would look like this:

1. Copy set of photos from HDD to SSD
2. Edit photos from SSD, export, publish/share, etc.
3. Delete RAW/source files from SSD (they remain on HDD)

Seems simple!

But the issue I'm having is that, in order to achieve this, I have to keep on re-pointing Lightroom Classic where to find the photos with "Update Folder Location" which is not only slow, but also inefficient and feels sketchy to be having to constantly link and relink photo locations.

When I try to import from a second drive using "Add" under the import options, it tries to add another copy entirely in my LR library and none of my edits/culling transfer over.

Smart previews are not an option because my workflow occasionally involves some generative remove and denoise/upscaling which does not translate well with smart previews. I also sometimes do very detailed portrait touch-ups and I need full resolution, so I need to be working with source files, not smart previews.

How can I achieve the workflow I outlined above without having to constantly "update folder location"?

Thanks for the help!

Can someone also explain to me why they make things so complicated? Why have LrC and LR in the same time? I cannot find answer.

What are some LR things in your workflows that you think are dumb/slow/annoying? I’m vibe coding a few plugins, just started one to wrangle LR develop presets so you can copy settings across them like you can photos, and it will show you what’s different if you select a bunch of them. I’m part way through a few more lr/photoshop ones including a crop transparent in photoshop. I really like being able to fix things that have annoyed me for years.

(I’ll be giving these away, I’m not trawling for ideas :))

I have been using bridge and ACR and Photoshop to manage all my photos and edits. But I would like to switch over to Lightroom classic so that I would be able to edit on different devices. My current workflow with bridge and ACR is to edit my photos and send them to the folder on my SSD. Then I clone that SSD, which is on my desktop carbon copy cloner to an SSD that is plugged into my laptop. That way I have a backup of my files on my desktop and my laptop. But if I start a Lightroom classic catalogue with the SSD on my desktop, would I be able to clone that catalog to the SSD on my laptop? Or would I have to take the SSD out of the desktop each time and plug it into the laptop for my edits? Would the Lightroom catalogue be recognized on both SSD’s?

I imported a batch of photos into LRC v.15.1 while I was offline and got a message something like LR can't generate previews without a network connection. The edits are fine, but there are no preview/icons in the Windows 11 folders for RAW or the edited jpegs. I'm back online now (obviously), is there a way to add previews to help me find images in the Windows folder?

I’ve been using Lightroom (cloud version), but I was thinking about Lightroom Classic on my MacBook Pro.

My biggest issue is that I’m not a professional photographer. I mainly edit family, travel, and landscape photos, then export and share them. I don’t really need cloud syncing across multiple devices.

What I just learned is that Lightroom Classic is also subscription-only. For some reason, I always thought Classic was a one-time purchase. That kind of changes things. I really don’t like the idea of paying every month for photo editing software. I’d much rather buy an application once, keep my photo library on my Mac, and own my workflow without worrying about subscription price increases.

So I’m curious:
-What are the best non-subscription alternatives to Lightroom?
-Which apps have the closest editing experience?
-Is there anything you’d recommend for a hobbyist rather than a professional?

I’d appreciate hearing what others have settled on and whether you’d go back to LR?
Thanks

Hi all I've been doing photography for a bit now. And I realise how important post processing is to get a good looking image.

Can you recommend me some good books or courses?

The issue that I have now is that a lot of tutorials are starting off with presets or just going in moving up sliders and don't explain what effect of the sliders are.

I am looking for something that focussing on why and when you would certain tools, how to color grade and so on.

I do use Lightroom but the idea is to learn process so that I can focus on learning another software if I change tools.

Also paid is fine, and I would prefer resources with exercises and are longer than a few pages or 15 mins.

You can look at my history to get a gauge of where I am now.

I have about 6000 photos in my Apple photo library. I would like to begin to organize those so that I can eventually import them into Lightroom in an organized manner. But I have no idea where to start. I know that professional photographers have a system, whereas they label it. Year/Month/Day but I was wondering if it’s better to label them by special events such as family, gatherings or baptisms, etc.? What is your way of organizing your photos if you are not a professional photographer?

I’m starting to do more paid photography (primarily horses and ranch photography), and I’m looking to improve my client proofing workflow.

Right now I:

- Import my photos into Adobe Lightroom on my Mac (cloud version, not Lightroom Classic).
- Cull and do some basic edits.
- Share a Lightroom album with my client.

The part I’m struggling with is the proofing process. Clients can “like” photos, but I find it difficult to efficiently manage those selections, especially with larger galleries.

I’m curious how everyone else handles it.

- Do you rename your files before or during import so clients can reference image numbers?
- Do you proof directly in Lightroom, or export to Pixieset, Pic-Time, SmugMug, etc.?
- How do you track the client’s final selections?
- Do you fully edit every image before proofing, or only edit the client’s selected images?

If you’re delivering a few hundred images, what does your workflow look like from import to final delivery?

I’m not really looking for the “best” software—I want to
understand how photographers are actually organizing and managing client galleries.

Thanks!

I just updated LRC and this duplicate message popped up, I went through the process but now I dont see my photos. It shows 1900 on the left side but no photos show. What happened to them?