How to Copy Your Lightroom Classic Presets Over to Lightroom CC

Have you taken the plunge from Lightroom Classic to the new Lightroom CC? The new program boasts periodic updates to speed up the post-processing and photo management workflow. But one area that you may struggle with is in copying your presets to the new platform. Terry White has a solution:

On first look it might appear that there is no direct way to copy all your presets from the old Lightroom Classic to the new Lightroom CC, but there is, in fact, a way.

copy presets from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC

Under the Presets panel, built-in presets appear at the top. At the bottom there is another section which lists the User Presets. Click on the upper right hand corner where the Menu, and click on Open Presets Folder.

copy lightroom presets

This opens up the location on your hard drive where the Lightroom presets are stored.

Once the Presets folder is open in your file manager, you might as well close Lightroom CC. The changes you’re about to make won’t be available until you restart the application.

manage lightroom presets

The next task is to find the Presets folder in Lightroom Classic. Go to Menu > Preferences and click on Show Lightroom Presets Folder.

Click on that folder, and you will be transported to a folder like this:

lightroom classic vs cc

You will notice that there are two folders here. One for the older Lightroom Classic and the other for the new Lightroom CC.

Click on the Lightroom folder (older Lightroom Classic) and then on the Develop Presets folder.

how to move presets in lightroom

Here all your existing Presets will be listed under different lists: User Presets, Lightroom Presets, and so on.

Keep in mind that simply dragging the Presets from the old Lightroom folder to the new one will make them unavailable in older Lightroom. What you need to do is copy them over to the new Lightroom so that they are available on both older Lightroom Classic and newer Lightroom CC.

transfer your presets to the new lightroom

Hold down the Option key on your Mac (control key on Windows) to make sure that the presets are copied and not moved. You can also do the simple Control+C and Control+V routine to copy the presets in Windows.

how to use presets with lightroom

Once the copy is done, relaunch Lightroom CC to check that the presets are now available under the Presets menu in Lightroom CC. You can now go ahead and arrange them in folders and organize them the way you like.

Have you made the switch to Lightroom CC? Tell us what you think.

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One response to “How to Copy Your Lightroom Classic Presets Over to Lightroom CC”

  1. Amanda says:

    Thank you so much! This saved my life!

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