Fix Presets

Fix Presets lets you use Mac Finder or Windows File Explorer to reorganize your develop presets and creative profiles into the groups displayed in the Presets panel and Profile Browser. (A “group” is what Lightroom calls a folder of presets displayed in the Preset panel and Profile Browser.)

Lightroom provides little ability to reorganize presets. In the Presets panel, you can drag just one develop preset at a time to a new group, and the Profile Browser doesn’t let you move creative profiles at all.

The original purpose of Fix Presets was to provide corrective workarounds for the many bugs and limitations introduced when Lightroom 7.3 moved from the old .lrtemplate preset format to the new .xmp format. Over the next many years Adobe slowly fixed the bugs and added new features, and as they did so, I removed the corresponding commands from Fix Presets.

Download and Install

Fix Presets is free. It requires Lightroom Classic 7.3.1 or later. (The newer cloud-focused Lightroom doesn’t support plugins.)

1. Download fixpresets.1.19.zip.
2. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of Fix Presets, exit Lightroom, delete the existing fixpresets.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 fixpresets.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 fixpresets.lrplugin folder, and click Select Folder (Windows) or Add Plug-in (Mac OS).

Using Fix Presets

1. Invoke the menu command File > Plug-in Extras > Fix Presets.
2. Click Organize into Subfolders to make the structure of the subfolders on disk containing the presets’ .xmp files mirror the groups displayed in the Presets panel and Profile Browser. Any presets that had been placed in the ImportedSettings folder by Lightroom’s Import Develop Profiles and Presets command will be consolidated with the rest of your presets in the Settings folder. You’ll be told to restart Lightroom.
3. Click Show Presets in Finder / Explorer to open Finder or File Explorer on the settings folder containing the presets.
4. In Finder or Explorer, reorganize the .xmp files into your desired subfolder structure.
5. Click Organize into Groups to make the groups in the Presets panel and Profile Browser mirror the new subfolder structure from the previous step. You’ll be told to restart Lightroom.

Lightroom doesn’t allow nested groups. If you create nested subfolders in Finder or Explorer, the Organize into Groups command will reflect the nesting in the names of the groups. For example, if you create nested subfolders Scans/Basic and Scans/Advanced, the corresponding groups will be named Scans, Scans > Basic, and Scans > Advanced.

Before modifying presets and preset folders, the plugin makes backup copies to make it easier to recover the originals and to protect against any bugs in the plugin. Backup copies of individual preset files have the extension .xmp_original and reside in the same folder. The backup copies of the user presets folder and the built-in presets folders are stored in the parent of the original folders.

Support

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

Version History