Presets

A preset is a saved look: a set of adjustments you can put on any photo with one click. Presets is the first icon on the right panel's edge, two overlapping circles above Adjustments. It works in the grid and in the editor. Click Adjustments to go back to the sliders.

• Apply a preset. Select one or more photos and click a preset in the list. It applies to every selected photo at once, with no confirmation, and the page stays open, so you can try one look after another. Cmd+Z undoes the whole batch in one step. A preset carries everything except Optics and Crop.
• Find one. The search field at the top filters every list and opens each group that has a match.
• Save your own. Get one photo looking right, then choose Save current as preset… at the bottom of the page, or press Cmd+Shift+N, and give it a name. It goes into My Presets, at the top of the list. Each preset there has a ⋯ menu with Rename and Delete.

Lightroom presets

LightPhotos reads Lightroom's .xmp develop presets. There are two ways to bring them in.

• Import from Lightroom… reads the .xmp files you pick and adds them to My Presets, so they keep working if the files move. This is in the desktop app only.
• Add preset folder… lists the presets in a folder and reads them where they are, with nothing copied. You can add as many folders as you like. Each preset group gets its own folded header under My Presets: its Lightroom group if it has one, otherwise the subfolder it sits in, otherwise the folder's name. Use this for a preset pack you keep somewhere, or Lightroom's own presets folder.

Preset folders belong to the open catalog, the way Lightroom Classic can keep presets with a catalog. My Presets is shared by every catalog on the computer. To take a folder off the list, open the Preset folders menu at the bottom of the page and choose Remove. The files stay on disk.

LightPhotos reads a folder again each time you open the Presets page, so presets you add to it show up. A Lightroom adjustment that LightPhotos has no slider for is left out: hold the pointer over a folder preset to see what it can't carry. Profiles, Looks and files that won't read are skipped, and the bottom of the page says how many. A scan goes eight folders deep and reads up to 5,000 files per preset folder.

In the web app, the browser may ask again for access to a preset folder after a restart. The folder then shows as Click to allow access to …; click it and allow.

A preset changes only the instructions stored next to the photo, like any other adjustment. Fine-tune from there on the Adjustments page.