Started new PC - cannot import my .lrtemplate legacy presets?

[michel_r92]

Lightroom Version Number

15.2

Operating System

1. Windows 11

I have started a brand new desktop PC aqnd i cannot get my previous develop presets. Import from develop/prest - no,
lightroom link to dropbox - no. Note that all my presets are .lrtemplate
Everything works fine on my laptio but which is LR 15.0.1 where as i am 15.2 om the desktop

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Develop presets in the old .lrtemplate format need to be converted to .xmp before Lightroom Classic can use them. They will also be stored in a different place after conversion. Lightroom Classic should do that conversion automatically the first time it starts and find the presets in the old folder. That old folder is here: C: \ Users \ [your username] \ AppData \ Roaming \ Adobe \ Lightroom \ Develop Presets

The question however is whether you are looking at the right presets. If you have develop presets on the laptop running Lightroom Classic 15.0.1, then these are .xmp presets, not .lrtemplate presets. They are stored here on the laptop, so copy them to the same folder on the new PC: C: \ Users \ [your username] \ AppData \ Roaming \ Adobe \ CameraRaw \ Settings

 

[michel_r92]

Thank you very much for this information. I am actually used to replacing the lightroom and camera raw folders by pointers to these same folders in my dropbox. This has been working very well. However what i am finding out is that when LR starts, it recreates these folders in my Roaming/Adobe folder, thereby i guess overriding my pointers. Would you happen to know why ? (this is not happening on my portable PC nor on my older PC)

 

[John R Ellis]

Make sure the Dropbox folders are marked for offline use.

 

[Gnits]

Or Dropbox folders have different settings on different devices..

Make sure none of your Catalogs are inside a OneDrive parent folder.. and be cautious if your images are inside OneDrive folders.

Catalogs and Synched Cloud Storage have a track record of corrupting catalogs… especially OneDrive.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Thank you very much for this information. I am actually used to replacing the lightroom and camera raw folders by pointers to these same folders in my dropbox. This has been working very well. However what i am finding out is that when LR starts, it recreates these folders in my Roaming/Adobe folder, thereby i guess overriding my pointers. Would you happen to know why ? (this is not happening on my portable PC nor on my older PC)

I’m surprised to read this, unless you are talking about something you did several years ago. Dropbox used to follow symbolic links a long time ago, so what you describe used to be possible. I used it too years ago. However, Dropbox changed this (already a few years ago if I remember correctly) and no longer follows symbolic links, at least not on Windows (to my surprise it apparently does work again on MacOS). That would explain what you are seeing now.

Update: if you mean the folder(s) are in Dropbox and you let Lightroom follow a symbolic link: in my experience on the Mac that works with the old .lrtemplates (and still does for on-develop presets for this reason), but it did not work for the Camera Raw folder.

 

[michel_r92]

I’m surprised to read this, unless you are talking about something you did several years ago. Dropbox used to follow symbolic links a long time ago, so what you describe used to be possible. I used it too years ago. However, Dropbox changed this (already a few years ago if I remember correctly) and no longer follows symbolic links, at least not on Windows (to my surprise it apparently does work again on MacOS). That would explain what you are seeing now.

Update: if you mean the folder(s) are in Dropbox and you let Lightroom follow a symbolic link: in my experience on the Mac that works with the old .lrtemplates (and still does for on-develop presets for this reason), but it did not work for the Camera Raw folder.

this is the second situation (LR following the links to dropbox). Works well on laptop and older win11 PC. But here LR recreates the cameraw and lightroom folders when it starts although the links are operational (cliking on the links gets me to the right place in my dropbox)

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Like I said; my experience (although on a Mac and some years ago) is that for some reason Lightroom does not follow a symbolic link to the CameraRaw folder, and it seems you are seeing that too. I don’t know why this is the case. It does follow symbolic links to most other folders, like the .lrtemplate non-develop presets and even its previews and smart previews can be moved to a different location using symbolic links, but not the CameraRaw folder. The reason might be that this folder is obviously shared with the Camera Raw plugin in Photoshop, and maybe that plugin can’t follow those links.

P.S. This is often confusing people: a symbolic link is not the same as a Windows ‘shortcut’ or a Macintosh ‘alias’. Shortcuts and aliases do not work.

 

[John R Ellis]

I hadn't tried this for several years, so just now I was able to set up a shared Dropbox/Settings folder containing my presets, using symbolic links to share the folder between my Mac and Windows LR.

Steps:

1. I copied the Settings folder containing all my presets into Dropbox/Settings.

2. In Finder and File Explorer, I right-clicked Dropbox/Settings folder and did Make Available Offline (to ensure a copy of the folder is always kept on the local disk).

3. On my Mac, I created a symbolic link from the standard location of CameraRaw/Settings to that Dropbox folder:

ln -s ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/Settings ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/CameraRaw

4. On my Windows, I did the same thing in a command prompt running as administrator:

mklink /d %appdata%\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings %homedrive%%homepath%\Dropbox\Settings

5. Now, when I create a preset on Mac LR, wait a second or two for the Dropbox sync to complete, then restart Windows LR, that preset appears in Windows LR. And vice versa.

 

[Gnits]

Is the option to keep settings Catalog specific a factor here ( or is this applicable).

 

[John R Ellis]

Is the option to keep settings Catalog specific a factor here

Good question. I repeated my experiment with the option Preferences > Presets > Store Presets With This Catalog, linking from Dropbox/Settings to the location of the develop settings folder in the catalog folder, and it also works.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Interesting. So this has changed, because many years ago it definitely did not work for the CameraRaw/CameraProfiles folder (that’s the one I tried, develop presets were still .lrtemplate at that time). I wonder why it does not work for the OP. Maybe he tried with a shortcut rather than a symbolic link (he said he used a ‘pointer’, so that could be anything)?