I recently needed to remove a photo in Lightroom Classic from a bunch of collections at once. Unfortunately, LrC doesn’t have a way to do this natively…you pretty much have to go to each collection and remove the photo individually.

But, what LrC does have (and is one of the biggest advantages of Classic over the non-pro-focused-cloud-based-Lightroom) is that it has the ability to use plugins.

And all plugins are are some Lua code and a manifest file wrapped up in a folder with the extension of .lrplugin.

So, I thought, “maybe I can write a plugin to do this?”

After all, I’ve been a software engineer for most of my career, and even though I know what Lua is, I’ve never actually written anything in it. But how hard could it be?

Turns out, not-terribly-hard.

First, I read through this starter guide on creating plugins.

Then, I grabbed the latest LrC SDK from here, which gave me a peek at the various APIs that LrC supports.

Then, firing up my trusty copy of VSCode, I got to work.

Thirty minutes later, I had a plugin running.

After testing and ensuring that it works as intended, I threw it up on GitHub to share with the world.

If you’re interested in using it, you can find it here.

The releases page has the latest (and first) version. A quick-and-dirty guide on how to use is on the front page of the GitHub site. Any problems or issues, please log an issue on GitHub.