Lightroom Batch Editing Tutorial

It’s a huge time saver to make edits on a picture and then share those same changes with many other similar photos. There are several ways to automatically add edits from a single photo into one or more other photos in Lightroom. What follows are the main techniques that work best for me. The Adobe programmers didn’t exactly make this stuff intuitive.

One-photo-at-a-time Edit Sharing Technique

Go to the “Develop” module.

Edit your master photo first

Pick a representative photo, and make all of your desired edits on it.

Copy which edits you want to place into another shot (or shots)

Click the “Copy…” button in the lower left of your screen.

Set or clear the checkboxes to configure which edits you want to propagate to another image inside the “Copy Settings” dialog. You don't have to include any editing steps that don't make sense to transfer into other shots.

Click the “Copy” button at the bottom of the “Copy Settings” dialog after you’ve finished selecting all of the edit steps you want saved.

Select an un-edited photo to receive edits

Click another un-edited image from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen that you want to have edited.

Click the “Paste” button in the lower left part of the screen. The selected photo will be edited with the features you have chosen.

Click on another image from the filmstrip to paste the edits into, if you want to transfer the same edits into yet another picture. Click the “Paste” button again.

How to Modify Multiple Images at Once

Go to the “Develop” module.

Edit your master photo first

Pick a representative photo (the “master” photo) and make all of the edits on it. Don’t worry if you made a few edits that you don’t want to transfer to the other shots, such as cropping, because you don’t have to transfer every single edit into other shots.

Select the multiple photos to transfer your edits into

Select the range of un-edited photos (Shift and Control buttons) that you want to transfer the edits into while your main edited photo is still active. Your active photo will have a white border on it in the filmstrip at the screen bottom. The other selected photos to receive the edits will have a medium-gray border on them in the filmstrip. Apple users will need to click the equivalent buttons that let you multi-select the desired photos.

Click the “Sync…” button at the lower-right of the screen.

The “Synchronize Settings” dialog

Select all of the edits to transfer into the chosen photos via the "Synchronize Settings" dialog. Make sure un-wanted edits get un-checked (such as “Crop”).

Click the “Synchronize” button to start the batch processing.

Your selected edits will get transferred into all of the selected photos at once.

Summary

The procedures to perform edit repetition and batch edits aren’t very intuitive in Lightroom. Once you have repeated these steps a few times, it becomes pretty easy to efficiently re-use your editing labor.

Learning these techniques will save you many hours of labor and also enable you to reliably repeat edits on multiple photos.