Any Shortcut

Change any Lightroom Classic keyboard shortcut in any of the 16 supported languages (over 460 editable shortcuts per language). View all the shortcuts and search by command description or shortcut. Quickly see which keyboard shortcuts are unused.

Any Shortcut provides the most comprehensive list of shortcuts available, incorporating The Lightroom Queen’s organization and descriptions. (Adobe’s documentation and in-app help is incomplete and inaccurate.)

Download free printable tables of shortcuts, created by Any Shortcut for all 16 languages, from The Lightroom Queen.

Any Shortcut also provides tools for discovering changes and errors made by Adobe in new releases of Lightroom. Adobe typically never announces such changes, and nearly every new release contains errors in the shortcut definitions for languages other than English. I’m hoping Adobe will use Any Shortcut’s tools to improve the quality of the non-English shortcuts.

Try it for free for 30 days.

Buy a license for $9.95.

Download and Install

Any Shortcut requires Lightroom Classic 10.0 or later. (The newer cloud-focused Lightroom doesn’t support plugins.) 

1. Download anyshortcut.16.zip.
2. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of Any Shortcut, exit Lightroom and replace the existing anyshortcut.lrplugin folder 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 anyshortcut.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 anyshortcut.lrplugin folder, and click Select Folder (Windows) or Add Plug-in (Mac OS).

The free trial is for 30 days—after that, you’ll need to buy a license. If you let the free trial lapse without buying a license, any custom shortcuts you’ve added will be deleted.

Buy a License

1. Buy a license for $9.95:  
   
   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 > Edit Shortcuts.
4. Click Buy.
5. Paste the key into the License key box and click OK.

Using Any Shortcut

Do File > Plug-in Extras > Edit Shortcuts to view and edit all Lightroom keyboard shortcuts. When the plugin first runs, it will ask for permission to change Lightroom’s shortcuts.

To find a specific command or shortcut, filter the displayed command shortcuts using the drop-down menus for Language, Category, Subcategory, or Mac/Windows. Or use Matching Text to search the category/command descriptions or Matching Shortcut to search the actual shortcuts. Check Modified to see all your modified shortcuts.

Click on a shortcut to change it. In the Edit Shortcut window that opens, check or uncheck the desired modifiers (Cmd, Ctrl, Opt, Shift). In Key, type a letter, digit, or punctuation character, or use the Key dropdown to select one of the special keys Delete, Down Arrow, Escape, F1 – F12, Left Arrow, Return, Right Arrow, Space, Tab, or Up Arrow. Lightrooom’s drop-down menu is fussy—the menu’s scroll bar will soon disappear if you don’t immediately grab it or use the down-arrow key to move the focus into it.

A greyed-out command shortcut cannot be edited since it is hardwired into Lightroom. Complain to Adobe.

Restoring Default Shortcuts

To restore Lightroom’s original shortcut for a command, click on it in the Edit Shortcuts window, then in Edit Shortcut click Default.

To discard all your modified shortcuts and restore Lightroom’s defaults, click Restore Defaults in the lower-right of the Edit Shortcuts window.

If you uninstall Any Shortcut, any modifications you’ve made will be left intact (at least until the next update of Lightroom). So do Restore Defaults before uninstalling.

Prior Customizations in TranslatedStrings

If you’ve previously customized keyboard shortcuts by manually editing the TranslatedStrings files, Any Shortcut will preserve those changes. But they’ll get discarded the next time you update Lightroom, since the update will overwrite the TranslatedStrings with the original files.

I recommend that before making any changes in Any Shortcut, you restore the factory TranslatedStrings files and then make your changes using Any Shortcut. Modifications you make in Any Shortcut are remembered across updates, and Any Shortcut will reinstall them as necessary after an update.

Moving to Another Computer

Your modified shortcuts are stored in the file anyshortcut.txt, and you can install your modifications on another computer by copying that file. The file is stored in this folder:

Mac: /Users/user/Library/Preferences/Adobe/Lightroom
Windows: C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom

(Note that folder is always used, regardless of the preference Store presets with this catalog.)

Settings

Click the gear icon ⚙️ at the bottom of the Edit Shortcuts window to access Any Shortcut’s settings. There’s just setting one for normal use:

Always show keyboard shortcuts in English: By default, modifiers and keys are shown in the current language. Enabling this option will display them in English.

The other options under ☠️ Advanced Settings control the Analyze Shortcuts command and are for Adobe and Any Shortcut developers analyzing other versions of Lightroom.

Analyze Shortcuts

The Analyze Shortcuts command provides website authors and Adobe developers with tools for managing Lightroom’s shortcuts—discovering silent changes made by Adobe, creating printable tables for the 16 supported languages, and detecting errors. Nearly every Lightroom release contains numerous errors in shortcut assignments for non-English languages, and these tools can help Adobe catch most errors before release.

Any Shortcut keeps the authoritative list of shortcuts, their descriptions, and their categorization in the spreadsheet Shortcuts.xlsx (in the plugin folder). This file must be manually edited to track the latest version of Lightroom.

Any Shortcut reads the TranslatedStrings files for the supported languages to obtain Lightroom’s shortcuts. Since no TranslatedStrings_Lr_en_US.txt file is provided in the installation, Any Shortcut generates one by scanning the app and warning of changes not reflected in Shortcuts.xlsx.

The tools are:

Scan the Lightroom app: Generates a TranslatedStrings_Lr_en_US.txt file by scanning the Lightroom app. This should be done once for each new version of Lightroom to discover new shortcuts and changes to existing ones. The scan can take several minutes, and Lightroom will be very sluggish until it completes.

Analyze all TranslatedStrings files: Examines each language’s TranslatedStrings file for errors in the definitions of shortcuts and differences between TranslatedStrings files and Shortcuts.xlsx, including new shortcuts not yet added to Shortcuts.xlsx.

Write Shortcuts-all-languages.csv: Creates a CSV (comma-separated values) text file containing the shortcuts for all languages. Open this file in Excel to look for shortcut inconsistencies across languages.

Create HTML and PDF tables: Generates formatted tables of the shortcuts for
each language, as PDFs and web pages (.htm).

Correct help keys in TranslatedStrings files: Updates all the localized shortcuts shown in Lightroom Help automatically from the actual shortcuts, saving backups of the TranslatedStrings files in the same folders. Adobe tries to maintain the localized Help shortcuts manually, and in the first releases of Any Shortcut in Lightroom 11 there were hundreds of errors. But Adobe has gradually fixed most of these, but remaining ones include showing the wrong key, using Delete or Backspace on the wrong operating system, showing the internal name for a key instead of the user-interface name (e.g. Esc instead of Escape), showing the English name for a key instead of the translation, inconsistent capitalization, variant names for the same key, using \ rather than ^L, inconsistent spacing (e.g. “Shift+F” instead of “Shift + F”).

By default, Analyze puts its output in the analyze folder on your Desktop, but this can be changed in ⚙️ Settings.

Updating Any Shortcut for a New Version of Lightroom

When you install a new version of Lightroom, Any Shortcut will automatically install your existing modified shortcuts. If there are new default shortcuts or changes to existing ones, a new version of Any Shortcut will be released shortly incorporating those changes, and new shortcut tables will appear on Lightroom Queen.

* * *

Lightroom Queen authors and Adobe developers should do these steps to update Any Shortcut to a new version of Lightroom and validate the shortcuts in the new version:

1. Do File > Plug-in Extras > Edit Shortcuts > Restore Defaults to ensure you don’t have any modified shortcuts installed.
2. Do File > Plug-in Extras > Analyze Shortcuts > Scan the Lightroom app to create a TranslatedStrings_Lr_en_US.txt file. Move the file and its accompanying .version.txt from the Desktop/analyze folder into the Any Shortcut plugin folder.
3. Do Analyze Shortcuts > Analyze all TranslatedStrings files.
4. Open the generated errors.txt and look for any warnings about shortcuts not listed in Shortcuts.xlsx (likely new shortcuts) or not matching TranslatedStrings. Edit Shortcuts.xlsx in Excel and add or change shortcuts as necessary. Pattern your edits based on similar commands already in the spreadsheet.
5. Developers: Correct mistakes in TranslatedStrings and run Analyze Shortcuts > Correct help keys in TranslatedStrings files.
6. Do Analyze Shortcuts > Create HTML and PDF tables to generate new PDFs and web pages.

Granting Any Shortcut Permission to Change Shortcuts

When Any Shortcut first runs, it will ask for permission to change Lightroom’s shortcuts’ files. Without such permission, it will be unable to save your changes.

On Windows 10 and Mac OS 12 and earlier, you’ll just have to click OK, possibly after entering your Windows/Mac password.

But on Mac OS 13 (Ventura) and later, Apple prevents apps from making such changes to permissions, even after the user has entered her password. So Any Shortcut will display a wizard that will walk you through the quick steps needed to manually change the file permissions of the Lightroom app.

If that wizard fails for some reason, do these steps instead:

1. Exit the Edit Shortcuts window.
2. In Finder, do the menu command Go > Go To Folder.
3. Copy/paste this path into Go To Folder:
   
   /Applications/Adobe Lightroom Classic/Adobe Lightroom Classic.app/Contents/Resources
   
   and hit return.
4. In Finder, do File > Get Info.
5. In the Info window that opens in the upper-left corner of your screen, at the bottom of the window, expand the Sharing & Permissions pane.
6. Click the lock in the bottom-right corner and enter your password.
7. Change the privilege of everyone to Read & Write.
8. Click the small circle “…” pop-up menu in the bottom-left corner and select Apply To Enclosed Items.

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 or omissions and mistakes in the shortcut lists.

Known limitations and issues:

• Some shortcuts are hardwired into Lightroom and can’t be changed. Complain to Adobe.
• Lightroom doesn’t allow shortcuts to be assigned to plugin commands, but you can assign shortcuts using Mac’s System Preferences or the free Windows AutoHotkey utility. See here for details.
• When Windows display scaling is set larger than 125%, a Lightroom bug causes glitches in the layout of Edit Shortcuts.
• In Develop on Mac, shortcuts Alt/Opt H, Alt/Opt I, and Alt/Opt J are treated as H, I, and J (the Alt/Opt is ignored).
• In Develop on Mac, an assignment of Shift H to a command (e.g. to Toggle Before/After) won’t work when the Masking panel is open—Shift H will be treated as H (Show/Hide Pins & Tool Overlays).
• The Up, Down, Left, and Right Arrow keys seem to be hardwired and can’t be assigned to other commands. Using modifiers (e.g. Shift Up) does work, at least in some cases.
• Opt can’t be used in a shortcut for Sync Metadata.
• On Mac, modifiers used with Space (e.g. Opt Space) are ignored.
• On Windows, Alt often works in shortcuts. But Alt is also the Windows keyboard accelerator for navigating menus, and if you use Alt letter, where letter is the accelerator key for a top-level menu in Windows, it often/usually won’t work. For example, Alt L opens the Library menu, so trying to use it in Any Shortcut may not work.
• On Mac, Opt Return and Shift Return often don’t work as shortcuts, though Alt Enter works on Windows.
• On Mac, Opt Escape and Shift Escape don’t work. On Windows, Alt Escape and Ctrl Escape don’t work.

Version History