Copy Settings

Copy Develop settings between photos with different formats, orientations, and crops, avoiding long-standing Lightroom bugs with copying local adjustments, crops, transforms, and red-eye corrections. For example, copy a healing from a portrait raw rotated in-camera to a TIFF produced from that raw by Photoshop.

Copy Red Eye and Lens Blur. Merge or replace Healing. Copy settings from missing/offline photos.

Define presets of commonly used groups of settings.

Enable or disable Lens Blur on multiple photos at once.

Extract masks from photos for use as Photoshop layer masks.

Convert mask components (brushes, gradients, etc.) to Add, Subtract, or Intersect (another missing feature).

Delete all develop snapshots from selected photos.

The plugin’s Copy Settings and Synchronize Settings commands are nearly identical to Lightroom’s built-in commands:

Try it for free for 30 days.

Buy a license for $9.95.

Bugs with Lightroom’s Copy Settings

Lightroom has long had bugs copying Develop settings that are tied to specific locations in a photo, including Brush adjustments, Graduated Filters, Radial Filters, Transforms, Spot Removals, and Crops. The copied adjustments end up at the wrong spot or have the wrong size. See these bug reports:

Local adjustments and crops don’t copy or work in presets applied to rotated photos
Synched brush not at the same place on a cropped copy
Synched spot removal to a cropped copy not sampling from the same place as in the original
Transform doesn’t copy/sync correctly

Recently, Adobe has changed its position and says that fixing at least some of them is “planned”, though it has marked at least one instance “as-designed” with no plans to fix it. Fixes may be in the next release, or they may be months or years down the road. Lightroom 10.2 fixed some of the bugs but introduced new ones.

I published a memo on the Lightroom Classic feedback site explaining the correct behavior, how to implement it, providing exhaustive test results, and including a test suite they can run against new releases. Of course, I’ve run this plugin through the same test suite.

Lightroom 11 fails to copy the on/off toggles of Develop panels.

Download and Install

Copy Settings requires Lightroom 6.0 or later, Lightroom CC 2015, or Lightroom Classic. (The newer cloud-focused Lightroom doesn’t support plugins.) 

1. Lightroom 13.3 and later: Download copysettings.1.29.zip.
   Lightroom 11 and later: Download copysettings.1.27.zip.
   Lightroom 10 and earlier: Download copysettings.1.3.zip.
2. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of Copy Settings, exit Lightroom, delete the existing copysettings.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 copysettings.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 copysettings.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.

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 > Copy Settings.
4. Click Buy.
5. Paste the key into the License key box and click OK.

Using Copy Settings

The Copying Settings and Synchronize Settings commands work just like the built-in Lightroom commands.

Select a photo and do File > Plug-in Extras > Copy Settings. Then select one or more photos and do File > Plug-in Extras > Paste Settings.

Alternatively, select two or more photos, with the source photo most-selected. Then do File > Plug-in Extras > Synchronize Settings.

If you copy AI masks, Remove, or Lens Blur, Copy Settings will invoke Update AI Settings automatically, if necessary, to recompute the AI results for the target photos.

The option Use Source AI Results will prevent that recomputation of AI results for the target photos, instead copying them directly from the source photo. That’s useful when you’re copying AI masks, Remove, or Lens Blur to a large number of target photos near-identical to the source photo—you don’t have to wait for the settings to be recomputed. And when Adobe starts charging Firefly credits for Generative Remove, you won’t be charged.

To define a preset for a group of settings, check the desired settings. Then in the Preset menu, choose New. To use that preset, just select it from the Preset menu.

Convert Mask Components

To change a mask component (brush, linear gradient, etc.) from Add or Subtract to Intersect, select the component and do File > Plug-in Extras > Convert to Intersect. Similarly, Convert to Add and Convert to Subtract change a component to Add or Subtract.

While it’s possible to do these conversions using built-in commands, it can take multiple steps when manipulating intersections and users have asked for the commands to be added to Lightroom.

Extract Masks

Use Extract Masks to extract a photo’s masks as grayscale images suitable for use as layer masks in Photoshop. Select one or more photos and do File > Plug-in Extras > Extract Masks. The extracted masks will be stacked underneath the photos:

Open the photo and a mask image in Photoshop, edit a layer mask for the photo, and copy/paste the mask image to the layer mask.

Due to lack of Adobe documentation for how masks are represented, Extract Masks is unable to extract luminance, color, and depth range masks.

Note that Lightroom’s Sky and Subject masks are lower-resolution than those created by Photoshop’s Select > Sky and Subject commands (and the algorithms appear to produce somewhat different masks).

Full Image Mask

The Full Image Mask command adds a mask with a linear gradient selecting the entire image, with the start and end of the gradient off the image. This lets you apply local adjustments to the entire image. You can add more than one full image mask to an image.

Delete All Snapshots

The Delete All Snapshots command deletes all the develop snapshots from the selected photos. If you apply this to many photos, make sure you’ve backed up your catalog first!

Virtual copies share the same snapshots with their masters. Due to a Lightroom bug, Delete All Snapshots won’t delete snapshots from virtual copies—you’ll need to delete them from the masters.

The command is not very fast—roughly 30 photos per second. When applied to hundreds or thousands of photos, Lightroom will continue to consume CPU time long after the command finishes, presumably completing the deletion in background. If you try to exit Lightroom before that background task completes, the Lightroom process will continue to run in background—be patient.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Mac OS: You can use the standard mechanism for assigning application shortcuts to plugin menu commands. In System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, select Adobe Lightroom Classic. Click “+” to add a new shortcut, then in Menu Title type “Copy Settings” (case matters) preceded by three spaces (“<space><space><space>Copy Settings”). In Keyboard Shortcut type the desired key or key combination.

Windows: You can use the standard menu keystrokes to invoke Copy Settings. For example, ALT+L opens the Library menu, U opens the Plug-in Extras submenu, and C invokes Copy Settings.

To reassign a different final keystroke to the Copy Settings command, edit the file Info.lua in the plugin folder. Move the & in front of the desired letter in the menu command’s name, changing the name itself if necessary.

To assign a single keystroke as the shortcut, download and install the free, widely used AutoHotkey. Then, in Windows File Explorer, navigate to the plugin folder copysettings.lrplugin. Double-click Install-Keyboard-Shortcut.bat and restart your computer. This defines Ctrl+Shift+C, Ctrl+Shift+V, and Ctrl+Shift+S to invoke this plugin’s Copy Settings, Paste Settings, and Synchronize Settings, rather than Lightroom’s built-in commands. To change the shortcuts, edit the file Copy-Settings-Keyboard-Shortcut.ahk in Notepad and follow the instructions in that file.

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:

• Paste Settings pastes to all the currently selected photos in Library Loupe view, rather than just the most-selected photo. This differs from the built-in command, which only pastes to the most selected photo. (Lightroom doesn’t provide plugins with the ability to detect Library Loupe view.) Paste Settings works correctly in Develop.
• Crop > Straighten Angle and Aspect Ratio aren’t implemented—Copy Settings copies all the crop settings. For more flexibility in copying just some of the crop settings, see the Any Crop plugin.
• Copying just Transform > Upright Mode doesn’t work with this plugin or the built-in Lightroom commands, even to photos with the same orientations. I haven’t figured out a workaround. See this bug report.
• Copying Transform > Upright Mode and Upright Transforms to photos with different orientations doesn’t work with this plugin or the built-in Lightroom commands. I haven’t figured out a workaround.
• Copying Transform > Manual Transform works with this plugin in many situations but not all—see here for a detailed list of where it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at all with the built-in Lightroom commands. I haven’t figured out a workaround.
• A Pet Eye’s catchlight doesn’t copy directly between photos with different orientations due to a Lightroom bug that I can’t work around.
• The Use Source AI Results option won’t correctly copy AI masks to target photos with orientations different from the source photo (because Adobe hasn’t documented the internal representation of the masks).
• Copying Lens Blur won’t copy any refinements, due to Lightroom limitations. See this bug report.
• Extract Masks is unable to extract luminance, color, and depth range masks (because Adobe hasn’t documented the internal representation of the masks).

Version History