How To Organize Lightroom Presets And Group Them
This post will walk you through how to organize your lightroom presets. If you’ve read some of my other posts about Lightroom, or if you’ve taken my Lightroom Masterclass, you know I only believe in presets if you get them in bulk, and cheap, and if you know how they work and what you are doing (for more on this, you can read this blog post). But if you are doing that, then you probably have more presets than you can handle!
Organizing your Lightroom presets will help you edit better
So, in ten years of editing, somehow, somewhere I ended up with hundreds of presets, mostly given to me by my friends some purchased, but hundreds non-the-less. Spoiler alert, I really only use the VSCO cam film kits, but every once in a while I like to browse and see the options, and sometimes I have tricky photos and some specific presets just work…
What I am saying is, if you have hundreds of presets, I don’t judge you! But I do think getting organized will help you. So the purpose of this post is to help you organize your Lightroom presets so they don’t show up all over the place and you can edit easier, better, and faster.
Where are your presets
follow these steps to find where your presets are located:
1. Open Lightroom and go to your develop module
2. Under your presets tab on the left, pick any individual preset (not a folder)
3. Right-click on the preset, then select show in finder
4. A finder window will reveal where you presets are located
5. Depending on what version of Lightroom you have this might vary
6. You should keep this window open so you can easily access it, as it’s usually inside your computer’s library folder which is often hidden from your regular browser, and therefore a bit of a pain to find
grab individual preset, right click to show in finder
Where your presets are stored in your computer
Backing up your presets
Before you start moving things around, let’s keep your presets safe. Now that you know where you can find all your presets, I would suggest you select all the folders, hit comand+c (or simply right-click and select copy) and paste them into a new folder called “preset backup” in a new location. You can throw that folder on your dropbox, a hard drive, or even a thumb-drive.
Getting organized
For some reason, Lightroom has a tough time keeping the organization from your finder into Lightroom. Sometimes you will find that your presets all float inside “user presets” in alphabetical order, without respecting the folder structure, and sometimes they magically sit organized inside their folders.
Here is why: Lightroom will only follow one folder structure, so having your presets in folders within folders won’t actually sub organize your presets in Lightroom. But now that you have backed up all your presets, we can start moving things around without worry.
This is how my folder structure looks. You can see that there is an SLR Lounge folder, and inside of it, you have many sub-folders containing the presets.
However, when you go into Lightroom, all you see is the sub-folder names. This confused me, as I had no idea the preset belonged to the SLR Lounge pack, and having other preset packs, made Lightroom organize them all alphabetically, so they all get mixed up together.
How to Organize Your Presets
As you have noticed by now, organizing your folders perfectly doesn’t get you an organized Lightroom. I tried EVERYTHING. I spent hours moving things around to make this work, and in the end, decided it is just easier to go with the flow. So, to best organize your lightroom presets that you already have, the best way to organize them is this:
1. Open the location of the preset basically repeat step one of this article)
2. Navigate back to see the name of the enclosing folder
3. Go back to Lightroom, click on the preset and select move
4. A window will pop up showing the current group: User presets
5. Select the arrows on the side, navigate to the top and create a new group
6. Create a new group, hit create and then ok, and Lightroom will move your preset there
7. Once the group exists, you can drag and drop the rest of the presets from that collection in
A few tips to get even more organized
I know the process described above is time-consuming, but once you are done you will be glad I helped you organize your Lightroom presets.
Here are a few tips to make this easer and more efficient:
- Start at the top of your user presets. As you move them one by one, you keep organizing the top preset
- Name the group starting with “zz” before the name. This will put the folder right at the bottom of your list and will make it easier to drag and drop. You can easily re-name it once you finished (right-click – rename).
- For any presets that you won’t use, simply right-click and delete the group or preset. There is no point in having clutter. I have a few packs that come with adjustments for each camera profile, because I shoot Nikon, I keep the Nikon and the standard profile only, and I delete the rest. But I only delete them after making a back-up. This way they don’t show up on my lightroom, but I can always load them in later if I happen to shoot with a different brand.
- For new presets, you can always drag the folder in your finding, or add them with the plus sign (I find that if the folder contains many subfolders it is easier to just drag it into tour finder). If it doesn’t show up in its containing folder, you can just follow the steps described above to organize them.
If you want to further clean up your presets there are a few other things you can do
Remove Lightroom default presets for further organization
Lightroom comes with a few default presets. If you didn’t know, then you won’t miss them, and if you use them, you can just get rid of the ones you don’t. this is fairly simple to do.
1. Go to presets
2. Click on the plus sign
3. Select manage presets
4. A pop-up window will show you all the presets currently available in your Lightroom
5. Select the ones you want to remove, and simply un-click them
How to remove lightroom default presets
Add your presets to the favourites folder
Lightroom has an option to create a favourites folder. This keeps your most-used presets at the top and with easy access. If you find yourself going to the same few presets all the time, this is a huge time saver. To add presets to your favourites folder, simply select the preset you like, and click add to favourites.
Rename your most used preset folders for easy Access
Another great trick for your most used presets is to rename the whole folder so it stays at the top. If there is a group of presets to love, rather than adding each single one to your favourites folder, you can rename the entire group, adding an @, *, or -, and this will bring the folder right to the top.
Hope this post will help you, and the hours I spent doing trial and error, will save you a ton of time when it comes to getting your lightroom presets organized, and into folders. Nothing makes creativity flow easier than a clean “house”.
Explore on the Blog...
The Photographer Business Framework
Online program on business foundations, marketing, sales, and all systems needed to help you succeed as a freelance photographer.
free download
How to Find Clients as a Photographer E-Book
Learn to find clients and level up your photography business with simple ideas you can start implementing today.
