As you may know, besides software, I do photography. In fact, on my photoblog, I’m approaching 15 years of posting a new photo every day (as of this writing, that’s 5448 days of new photos). My main tool for managing, organizing and processing my photos is Adobe’s Lightroom (Classic), which I’ve used since version 1 when I started my “modern” photography hobby/side-business in 2007 (I’d done photography in the past, but had pretty much stopped after college as I no-longer had access to a darkroom, was too busy/poor/had other priorities/obligations for film and digital wasn’t cheap enough/good enough for what I wanted to do).

One of the key features of Lightroom is the ability to create and use presets, which apply develop settings to the selected image, adjusting exposure, color, crop, etc., without user intervention. Some photographers are adamantly against the idea of presets, as they view each photo to be processed as a clean slate that requires careful finessing of values to process. On the other end of the spectrum, you have lazy people who apply a preset without any additional work, export the photo and call it a day. However, most Lightroom users lie somewhere in the middle—using a preset as a starting point for processing an image, followed by fine-tuning it to perfection. 

I am one of the latter Lightroom users. I’ll often open a photo and scroll through my presets looking for a good starting point for the “look” I want a photo to have. Besides creating my own presets, I like to explore other people’s presets they’ve shared in the Lightoom (Cloud) or Mobile app (note that Adobe has two confusingly-named Lightroom applications…one is the professional version (Classic) that most serious photographers use and the stripped-down, amateur/mobile-focused Lightroom (Cloud) that doesn’t, in my opinion, have a place in a professional’s toolkit). In Lightroom Cloud, there’s a “Discover” section that allows you to browse shared presets and download them to use for yourself:

If you filter by “Preset downloadable”, you can scroll through the photo grid and download the preset for any photo:

Lightroom Cloud will then save it to your account and it can be used on any photo in Lightroom Cloud or Lightroom Mobile (the presets will sync to the Lightroom app on your phone).

At this point, however, you can’t use them in Classic, yet. Since the Lightroom Cloud presets don’t sync to Lightroom Classic, you have to do some work to get them there. 

(Note that the following instructions are for MacOS, but should be similar on Windows)

1. Find your Lightroom Cloud library (~/Pictures/Lightroom Library.lrlibrary)
2. Right click and select “Show Package Contents”
3. In that folder, there are 4 subfolders. One has a bunch of random characters; the others are profiles, TemporaryEdits and user.
4. Click into the random characters folder.
5. Find the cr_settings subfolder and click into it.
6. The .xmp files here are your presets.
7. Copy these to where your Classic presets are stored (should be something like ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/Settings
8. Restart Classic

Voila! Your presets should be there in the Presets pane in Lightroom Classic. The problem with this is that Adobe saves the presets to your local drive as a guid rather than a human-readable name:

If you’re like me, though, this is unacceptable. I want to be able to read the names of the presets while in Finder. So, to solve this, I built a tiny MacOS application I call Lightroom Preset Renamer. This is how I use it:

1. Copy the .xmp preset files you found in the Lightroom Library.lrlibrary file to a temporary folder.
2. Run the Preset Renamer application and choose this folder by clicking the “Choose Preset Folder to Process”:
   
3. Once you’ve chosen the folder, it will automatically process any .xmp file in that folder, renaming it to it’s “proper name”, while preserving the original file by changing the extension to “xmp_old”:
   
4. Now, copy these .xmp files to the CameraRaw/Settings folder as outlined above and then reset Classic.

A couple of notes: 

1. This app isn’t signed, so you may need to follow the instructions here to run it. Or, if you’re adventurous and have to run unsigned apps often, you can disable Gatekeeper by following these instructions.
2. If you’re concerned about security, you can inspect the source code and build the app yourself in Visual Studio Mac by going to this Github repository.
3. Since this is built on .Net, I plan on building a Windows version soon…stay tuned!
4. You can download the application at the link below:

Download the latest release here