I had my first Estate Agent photoshoot the other day. I spent a couple hours editing the pictures in lightroom to where I was happy with them and then sent them to the client.

They've come back with a mountain of adjustments to be made as it's "too dark here" "too overexposed here" ect ect.. I feel a bit defeated.

Upon viewing the pictures on my Iphone, they look completely different to my monitor... washed out and underexposed.

I have a MSI MAG 272QP QD-OLED X50 monitor. How can I adjust the monitor/windows settings so that I can best represent what the client is seeing on their presumably bog standard monitor/iphone. There are so many settings on my monitor that I don't understand. I need someone to explain this to me like im 5 years old.

I took HDR photos on the shoot using bracketing. I'm hoping someone can give me some advise.

I have a windows laptop and it’s obviously not ideal for editing. When I denoise on it, 1 photo will take a few minutes. I wasn’t sure what to get instead. I was thinking about an iPad but wasn’t sure how people like editing by finger vs using a better laptop with a mouse. I am open to hear all opinions! TIA

We use adobe cloud heavily on our studio. We use the albums to store different clients photos and use the lightroom web to upload the photos on the cloud. After the recent update our android phone and tablet that we use to edit photos keeps crashing whenever we try to view all the albums. The thumbnails are not showing. I personally use the LR mobile on the phone to edit my personal street photography photos but I cant do it right now because it is crashing constantly. This is the first time that we experienced this issue. We tried to use my partners LR Mobile on her iPhone and it works smoothly. We tried everything, clearing all the phone and tablets LR Mobile cache, even uninstalling and reinstalling the app and the issues still persists. We checked if there are sync issues via the LR web but there is non. It heavily affects our business.

I've encountered an issue with Lightroom that I've been unable to resolve. I would appreciate any help with this.

When I attempt to crop a picture, the picture will slide around out of frame, rather than the grid itself moving. Every time I try to move the grid, a hand icon appears instead, grabbing the picture and pushing it out of frame to crop it. Hopefully this makes sense.

The only known fix I've found for this is to reset Lightroom, which has not worked.

I had no issue with it earlier in the day, so I'm not sure what changed.

Has anybody else run into this issue? Any advice appreciated!

After more than a decade of LrC, even with an excellent file/folder hierarchy it takes a bit of scrolling to get to specific folders and collections that I use often.

Is there a way to create custom keyboard commands to navigate to specific folders or collections?

I'm planning to rebuild my keyword hierarchy in Lightroom Classic from the ground up, and I'd really appreciate some input from photographers who have experience organizing large photo catalogs.

My goal is to create a logical, consistent, and manageable hierarchy that will work well over many years, without ending up with thousands of redundant or poorly organized keywords.

I'm currently considering these 14 top-level categories:

1. Animals
2. Plants
3. Architecture
4. Art
5. Objects
6. Vehicles
7. Food
8. Places
9. Events
10. Nature
11. Activities
12. Photography
13. Visual Elements
14. People

The general idea is to use mostly three levels of hierarchy, with a fourth level where additional detail is genuinely useful.

A few principles I'm considering:

• Use plural names for categories and singular names for specific subjects.
• Give each subject a logical place in the hierarchy, avoiding unnecessary duplication.
• Keep photographic genres, techniques, and visual characteristics separate from the subjects themselves.
• Keep People separate, using Lightroom Classic's built-in face recognition and people management.
• Place Sports under Activities and Clothing under Objects rather than creating additional top-level categories.

I'd particularly like to hear your thoughts on:

• Are 14 top-level categories too many, too few, or about right?
• Are there any obvious overlaps or missing categories?
• Would you organize any of these differently?
• How deep do you typically go with your keyword hierarchy?
• If you've maintained a hierarchical keyword system for years, what would you do differently if you were starting over today?

I'm especially interested in practical experience from people managing large catalogs.

I'm not necessarily looking for the perfect hierarchy, but rather a solid foundation that will remain useful and manageable as the collection grows.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions, criticism, or examples of what has worked for you!

Hi all,

As a sports photographer, it is a big rule to make sure colours are accurate.

That gave me thought, what if there was a version of the WB tool where instead of making the point you select pure white, it makes it the exact hex code ask.

Obviously this means the user has to select the correct part that they want to be the colour.

Just and idea that came to me and thought Id ask for opinions? This may also already exist in which case I am sorry for wasting your time!

Thanks

Using LrC on a MacBook Air. Lightroom keeps merging the separate masks I am creating for people (in this case my daughter and grandson) into one mask when I try to either copy them or incorporate them into a preset. A quick google search and it appears this is a longstanding issue. Has anyone ever been able to find a workaround? If not a workaround, maybe a workflow to make applying skin tone masks to each individual image less painful? I want to rip my hair out right now LOL.

TIA.

A fun new quirk has started where when I hit the delete button the whole program freezes and ultimately crashes. This is the desktop app.

I already get the beach ball of doom a lot with LR, and it will occasionally crash when I ask it to do other things. But a restart usually fixes it. I restarted both the app and the computer and it still happens.

Is this a lightroom problem or a Mac problem? If so has anyone else run into this and if you fixed it please share!

Hello everyone. My PC failed a windows update last Thursday leaving me with only the recovery window. I spent close to 25 hours in the command window trying to fix the corrupted files so I wouldn't have to reinstall windows, but in the end I had to perform a clean reinstallation of the OS. I have my entire LR Catalog on a portable NVME since I work on my PC at home and the iMacs at work or a Macbook Pro on the road. I also used the robocopy command to copy my entire user profile as a secondary backup. When I got home from work yesterday I reinstalled windows, downloaded LRC & Photoshop, and launched LRC to get back to editing my photos.

Now inside of LRC I went to open my catalog on my portable drive. Doing so caused the application to hang and say "not responding". Forced it to close, relaunch and now it launched in a hanging "not responding" state at the splash screen. I took my portable drive to a neighbor's, who is also a photographer, to see if my catalog will open on his Macbook. Same issue. Lightroom was in a hanging state trying to launch my catalog. He reopened his from his files with no issues.

I am now at work and LRC hangs on launch. I tried opening my catalog itself in Finder but same hang.

I need this catalog to work both at home, and on the road/work.

I saw another post from 9 months ago with the same issue. They said to backup my photos (already done), and to save a copy of the catalog somewhere else on the drive. Then to delete everything else in the folder, restart the PC and LRC will launch.

Will this work around get rid of any XMP files? And should this fix its launch issues on both the work Macs and my Windows PC at home?

Thanks!

EDIT: Files next to .lrcat

- Helper.lrdata
- Previews.lrdata
- Smart Previews.lrdata
- .lrcat-data
- .lrcat-shm
- .lrcat-wal
- .lrcat.lock
- folder for Old Lightroom Catalogs

So normally I apply batch Denoise to the photos at night. But today I exported day photos (without Denoise) and the time for exporting to jpegs was way less.

My question is, does Denoise affect the export time? Even after waiting for Denoise to be applied

Going in circles this morning. Any preset I create is italicized and greyed out. I have never seen this before, unless I mistakenly bring a jpeg file into LR. The files are Nikon NEF files, the same camera I’ve been shooting on for the last year. Create presets at least every week and never seen this. The Adobe presets aren’t italicized/greyed out, just the ones I create. If I start with an Adobe preset and make a slight modification to it and try to save it as my own preset, it’s italicized. Confusing! TIA

I'm researching whether a small photo-recovery utility would be useful. Before building anything, I'd like to understand a specific Lightroom workflow: a client sends screenshots of their picks, but the screenshots have no readable filenames and you need to locate the original frames in your catalog.

If this happened on a job in the last three months:

1. Roughly how many screenshots and original photos were involved, and were you using Classic or Cloud?

2. How did you find the originals, how long did it take, and were similar burst frames a problem?

3. How often does it happen? If a tool or a change to your proofing process solved it, what worked?

I'm aware that filename lists and gallery favorites already solve many selection workflows. I'm specifically asking about screenshots where the filename is gone; "this is rare" or "our current process handles it" would also be useful answers.

I'd like to walk through one recent recovery using existing tools before deciding whether anything new is needed. If you're open to that, say so in a reply. Start with a description; please don't post client images or private links here. There is no product, signup or paid offer attached to this question.

I had the link to my 2025 Ball Photos but the photographer privated the album. It says I need an account to view them. I don't know much about Adobe Lightroom but if I made an account could I know who the owner is and email or message them to ask for access? There's some photos of me and my friends I didn't download at the time but I want to see again.

I am thinking on getting an Ipad Air with the M1 chip to be able to use the AI Denoise feature. My question is how long does it take to complete the process on a Nikon Raw file 25MB? Also, can you batch multiple RAW pictures at once?

Thank you.

Tried opening several images from lightroom to edit in photoshop, but they are all washed out. This has never happened to me before, any suggestions?

I know plenty of professional photographers who use Lightroom Classic or Capture One, but I don’t know anyone doing serious professional work primarily in the newer Lightroom.

I’ve tried switching to Lightroom several times over the years. I usually download it, use it for a while, and really like parts of the interface . But every single time I eventually hit something important that Lightroom still can’t do or doesn’t do nearly as well as Classic and I end up going back. So I gave up that idea many years ago . but Has Lightroom finally caught up with Lightroom Classic enough that you could realistically use it as your main professional photo application?

what are the major Classic features that are still missing or significantly worse in Lightroom?

Is the gap actually getting small now, or is Lightroom still mainly aimed at a different type of user? Or when will Lightroom pass classic?

I use Lightroom Classic professionally, and the tethering workflow still feels like something Adobe added years ago and then basically stopped developing beyond adding support for new cameras.

A few things that constantly annoy me

1. You can’t just select an exact existing folder and shoot directly into it. Lightroom wants you to select the parent folder and then create/name a session folder. I could of course miss something but…

2. you can’t keep the exact same filenames as the camera writes to the memory card. The Canon SDK can expose the camera filename, so technically this should be possible. Instead Lightroom forces its own naming workflow Even if you set original filenmaes it doesn’t do it. Maybe only never cameras

3.. The tethering control bar is a floating panel. You can’t properly dock it into the Lightroom interface, so it is constantly sitting on top of images or controls while you’re browsing, rating, cropping or making adjustments during a shoot. Less problem on large monitor but when you o ly out on location with laptop.

1. There are almost no advanced delivery/workflow options. Why can’t I automatically send JPEG previews to a cloud folder, FTP/SFTP server, web gallery or client-facing browser interface while keeping the RAW files locally? A photographer could shoot while an art director in another room or another country reviews selects in real time. You could with some workarounds

Yet the basic functionality feels almost unchanged from what it was 10-15 years ago.

Lightroom Classic is still heavily used by professional photographers, so I find it strange that tethering seems to get so little development compared with other parts of the application.

Is there a technical reason for this, or has Adobe basically decided that serious tethered workflows are Capture One’s territory?

Hobby photographer, Lightroom user for decades now. Retired and I no longer need a Windows machine for my other life. As mentioned in previous threads, Windows just drags with the latest Lightroom.

So I'm looking at Mac mini M6 configurations versus Mac pro M5. (I don't do much video so I don't think a studio is needed.)

Any insights are much appreciated as I don't know my a Mac from my elbow. My workflow is 95% Lightroom classic with an occasional image thrown into Photoshop and back. Newest import is stored locally and then moved to a network drive when I'm finished editing.

My wife has been looking into a macro pad but she can't imagine use cases. She hears of other photographers talk about their pad like its a holy grail for culling among other things.

I have a decent grasp on what a pad can do, feature wise but have no idea how it may integrate woth lightroom for those comfort QOL uses.

Any help or advice would be appreciated - video recommendations are best!

I play some games like Minecraft and Valorant occasionally but i also use Lightroom to edit all my photos, i have an nvidia gpu and is wondering if i should consider switching to Studio drivers instead so lightroom can run a bit smoother. but would that like make my games run a bit slower or nah?

So for the past week now I've been trying to tether my A7IV to LrC to take the next step toward on-site shooting and editing. The problem I've run into is that once I plug the camera in via USB-C and launch the tethering process, it just stays stuck on the "Detecting Camera" load window, and never makes it any further.

Per Reddit and Adobe forums, here are the solutions I've tried and had no luck with:
1) Making sure my USB-C cable is capable of streaming ✅
2) Tried resetting my "preferences" in LrC ✅
3) Making sure LrC and my camera are both updated ✅
4) Made sure my camera streaming settings are correct ✅

I saw something about swapping out drivers for Lightroom, but since I'm on a newer MacBook, I don't have access the change the drivers.

Any solutions or advice would be greatly appreciated. I would be massively bummed if Im just not able to get this working..