Published on March 3, 2022
How do I batch edit photos in Lightroom?
If you have a batch of photos that were taken with the same settings and under similar conditions, you might want to apply some (basic) adjustments to all of those photos. You can save a lot of time if you edit the entire batch at once, instead of editing them all individually.
In this blog I’ll show you my preferred method to do that in Adobe Lightroom.
Step 1: Edit first photo
Once you imported the photos you want to edit into Lightroom, go to ‘develop’ to edit your photos. Select the first one of the batch. Edit that first photo to make it look the way you want.
Step 2: Batch edit
When you’re done editing the first photo, hold the SHIFT key and click on the last photo of the batch. As you can see in the image below, I selected the entire row of photos. The first photo of this selection looks a bit brighter, this bright one should be the photo that has the settings that you want to copy. So make sure the bright one is the photo that you already edited.
Once you made the selection, click ‘Sync..‘.
The Synchronize Settings window will open. You can now choose which settings you want to apply to the rest of the selected photos.
If you also synchronize image specific settings (transform, spot removal, crop and masking), it will apply to the rest of the photos in the exact same way as it does to the first photo. So I’d suggest you only synchronize these settings if the photos are all framed in the exact same way (if you shot the photos on a tripod, for example). Otherwise you still have to adjust these settings for the rest of the batch, which doesn’t necessarily save you time.
When you selected which settings you want to synchronize, click ‘synchronize‘. Lightroom will now apply the selected settings from the first photo to the rest of the selected photos.
To deselect the batch of photos, press CTRL+D. Then select the photo you want to edit further or that you want to save.
And that’s how you edit a batch of photos in Adobe Lightroom! I use this technique very often and in my experience this can really speed up your workflow.
Learn more about Lightroom
Want to learn more about editing in Adobe Lightroom? Check out my other blogs or take a look at my YouTube Channel.
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