Lightroom Tips: how to export all your presets in a few clicks

13 September 2013

This time I'm not going to talk about my photos or photography in general, but I'm going to talk about one of the best piece of software ever made, Adobe Lightroom. A few days ago I bought a new computer, as my 4 years old iMac had enough of me, and I got an Apple Mac Mini with a very good monitor, an Asus PB278Q. But now I have a problem: I have to move all my files, my email accounts, and especially the billion of presets I made over the years on Lightroom. Well, maybe they are not a billion, but for sure several hundreds. And while Lightroom does a lot of things well, there are a few where it doesn't really shine, and one of these is how to export presets (unless there is a secret button that I don't know). From the interface you can only export one presets at a time, and it's fine if you have a few presets, but quite insane if you have hundreds, as in my case.
But the Nerd there is in me felt that there were a quicker way, as these presets has to reside somewhere on my computer, as simple files I can copy in a few clicks, so I started to google around, and I found out that I was right.
All your presets, but not only those, as you can do the same with the export presets and your watermark, can be found at this path:

/Users/[user name]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/

or (If you are a Windows user) at:

C:Users[user name]AppDataRoamingAdobeLightroom

In this folder you will see several folders, the "Develop Presets" is the one where your presets are, but you can also see your Export Presets, Watermarks, Print Templates (if you use them), Color Profiles, etc... Which I can copy and paste (and do a backup of them is not a bad idea at all) on my brand new computer.