Simple Presets Management in Lightroom

presets listHere is a quick and easy method to organize presets in Adobe Lightroom that I picked up when organizing my iPod playlists. The problem I had with my iPod lists was I had a few utility playlists that set the foundation for automatically generated Smart Playlists. These utility playlists would appear all over the place in my playlists menu making things a bit of a mess. The solution was to rename the utility lists to appear only at the bottom and out of my way.

The idea behind this means of organizing is to use the automatic alphabetical sorting of the presets list to your advantage. Symbols such as the dash (-) or the asterisks (*) will always appear at the top of the list followed by numbers. Seldom used letters such as X or Z will appear at the bottom. The next step is to group your presets by the kind of settings or effect for everything else that appears in between.

In my screenshot you can see I placed the Lightroom default settings at the top with a single dash (-). Following that are the actions I would need access to most quickly using a double dash (–). At the end of my list I have seldom used presets designed to remove settings using a X with an underscore (the underscore is to help legibility).

This is a simple and effective means of organization that scales very well. The best part is, it takes little effort to implement.

Comments

  1. I’d still prefer to see my request of having preset containers that let you bundle similar presets together. I’ve been using spaces at the start of names to bring them to the top for years..

    – SeanMcFoto
    January 23rd, 2007 at 9:28 pm

  2. I’ll second that. Folders (containers) are a must and would be a trivial thing to implement considering that functionality is already prevalent in other portions of Lightroom.

    I’m not too concerned by the lack of folders in the Beta though. I’ve heard rumblings that it’ll happen at some point. We’ll see what version 1.0 will bring when it’s released shortly.

    Update: …and 1.0 has come and no folders. Dang.

    – Daniel
    January 24th, 2007 at 10:39 am

  3. Presets are like Actions in PS. In PS one can have folders with different types of Actions grouped together. A similar thing would be handy here too. Esp if you could nest folders.

    – jjj
    January 29th, 2007 at 6:15 pm