Any Menu

With just a few keystrokes, invoke any Lightroom menu item, plugin command, script, preset, keyword set, color label set, folder, or collection. Assign single-key “quick keys” to your most frequently used items, regardless of whether Lightroom has assigned a keyboard shortcut.

For example, to invoke the Edit Capture Time menu item, you could type Ctrl+x ed c tim Return. To invoke it subsequently, you could type Ctrl+x e Return. (On Windows, use Alt+x.)

As another example, you could assign the quick key i to your favorite Develop preset. To apply the preset in Develop or Library to the currently selected photo, type Ctrl+c i. (On Windows, Alt+c i.)

Try it for free for 30 days.

Buy a license for $11.95.

Download and Install

Any Menu requires Lightroom Classic 10 or later. (The newer cloud-focused Lightroom doesn’t support plugins.) 

1. Download anymenu.1.4.zip.
2. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of Any Menu, exit Lightroom, delete the existing anymenu.lrplugin folder, and replace it with the new one extracted from the downloaded .zip. Restart Lightroom and you’re done.
3. If this is a new installation, extract the folder anymenu.lrplugin from the downloaded .zip and move it to a location of your choice.
4. In Lightroom, do File > Plug-in Manager.
5. Click Add, browse and select the anymenu.lrplugin folder, and click Select Folder (Windows) or Add Plug-in (Mac OS).
6. On Windows, you’re done.
7. On Mac, do File > Plug-in Extras > Any Menu > Any Menu.
8. When Mac OS says, “Adobe Lightroom Classic wants to control System Events”, click Allow.
9. When Mac OS says, “Adobe Lightroom Classic would like to control this computer using accessibility features”, in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility, toggle Adobe Lightroom Classic to On.

The free trial is for 30 days—after that, you’ll need to buy a license.

Buy a License

1. Buy a license for $11.95:  
   
   The license includes unlimited upgrades. Make sure you’re satisfied with the free trial before buying.
2. Copy the license key from the confirmation page or confirmation email.
3. Do Library > Plug-in Extras > Any Menu > Any Menu.
4. Click Buy.
5. Paste the key into the License key box and click OK.

Using Any Menu

Assign the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+x (Mac) / Alt+x (Win) to the plugin’s Any Menu command and Ctrl+c / Alt+c to the Quick Key command. See here for details.

Type Ctrl+x (Mac) / Alt+x (Win) to invoke the Any Menu command and then one or more space-separated strings. Any Menu will display all the items containing all the strings, with the five most recently used items listed first:

Type Return / Enter to invoke the first item or click on any item with the mouse.

Type Ctrl+x Return / Alt+x Enter to invoke the last-used item.

Select which categories of items are displayed using the checkboxes at the bottom of the window. Checking the Quick Keys category restricts the displayed items to those with defined quick keys.

Quick Keys

Assign a “quick key” to an item by searching for it in Any Menu and then entering the key in the Quick key column:

To invoke that quick key, type Ctrl+c (Mac) / Alt+c (Win) and then the key:

A quick key can have more than one character, e.g. i1. The corresponding item will be invoked as soon as the keys you’ve typed match exactly one quick key.

Applying Presets

When you select a develop preset, metadata preset, or export preset, Any Menu follows Lightroom’s confusing and inconsistent rules for handling selections of multiple photos. If you’re in Library, then the preset will be applied to all the selected photos. If you’re in Develop, develop presets and metadata presets will be applied to just the current (most-selected) photo, while an export preset will export all the selected photos.

After applying a develop preset containing AI settings, those settings will be updated if you’ve checked Update AI Settings for Develop Presets.

Generating Indexes

To enable Any Menu to run quickly, the plugin creates indexes of all items in Lightroom’s main menu bar, one index for each of Lightroom’s modules (Library, Develop, etc.). When Adobe releases a new version of Lightroom, Any Menu will need new indexes. When you run Any Menu, if there isn’t an index for the current module and Lightroom version, Any Menu will create one.

On Windows, creating an index for a module takes about a second. But on Mac, it can take 40 – 90 seconds, due to Apple’s creaky Applescript infrastructure. If you don’t want to wait, regenerate all the module indexes by doing File > Plug-in Extras > Any Menu > Generate Indexes. That command will take just a few seconds on Windows but many minutes on Mac.

If Any Menu appears to be invoking commands that don’t correspond to what you’ve selected, do Generate Indexes, selecting just the option Validate indexes. If that discovers possible inconsistencies contact me at my support address.

Keyboard Shortcuts

You’ll need to assign the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+x and Ctrl+c (Mac) / Alt+x and Alt+c (Win)—Lightroom doesn’t allow plugins to do that automatically:

Windows:

1. Download and install the free, widely used AutoHotkey.
2. In File Explorer, navigate to the plugin folder anymenu.lrplugin. If you don’t remember where it is, in Lightroom do File > Plug-in Manager, select Any Menu, and in the Status panel, click Show in Explorer.
3. Double-click the file Install-Keyboard-Shortcut.bat.
4. Restart your computer.

To change Alt+x and Alt+y to something else, edit the file Any-Menu-Keyboard-Shortcut.ahk in Notepad and follow the instructions in the file.

If you’re running Lightroom in a language other than English, follow the instructions in the file.

Mac OS:

1. Open System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts.
2. Click + to add a new shortcut.
3. In the Application menu, tediously scroll to the bottom and select Other…
4. Navigate to Applications > Adobe Lightroom Classic and select Adobe Lightroom Classic.app.
5. In Menu title type three spaces followed by the words “Any Menu” (the three spaces are required, case matters, and don’t enter the quotes).
6. In Keyboard shortcut type Ctrl+x (hold down Ctrl and type x).
7. Repeat those steps for the menu title “Quick Key” and shortcut Ctrl+c.

Support

Please send problems, bugs, suggestions, and feedback to ellis-lightroom@johnrellis.com.

I’ll gladly provide free licenses in exchange for reports of new, reproducible bugs.

Known limitations and issues:

• Any Menu won’t recognize Develop presets if you’ve enabled the Lightroom option Preferences > Presets > Store presets with this catalog.
• If you have hundreds or thousands of presets visible in the Develop Presets panel (rather than in hidden groups), Any Menu could be very slow to launch the first time you run it in a session, and Any Menu won’t try to reload the presets for the rest of the session. If you add, delete, or rename presets, you’ll need to restart Lightroom for Any Menu to see the changes. This is caused by a very old elementary programming error in Lightroom that Adobe hasn’t fixed.
• The Photo > Set Keyword menu isn’t implemented.
• For the Photo > Set Color Label command, Any Menu uses the original color names (Red, Green, etc.), not the user-chosen name in the current color label set.
• On Mac, if you get the error “System Events got an error: AppleEvent handler failed. (-10000)”, simply redo the Any Menu command. The Mac/Lightroom AppleEvents / Applescript used by Any Menu appears to be slightly flakey. If you get these errors often, please let me know.

Version History