Lightroom Quick Tip: Use Auto Sync
When you are working on a shoot where your lighting and camera settings are fixed, there are changes that you would like to quickly pass to the other images in the shoots. Getting this done quickly can be a great time saver in your workflow. Let me speed this up just a little bit further by adding another tool to your arsenal – Auto Sync.
When you make some develop setting changes to your images, you have the option to select the images that are next to the one that you changed. Pressing the Sync button at the bottom of the basic panel lets you take the settings that you set for the originally selected image and pass them over to the other images in the list.
This feature is great in that it lets you take everything from cropping to process version over to each of the images. The only caveat? If you make more changes to the images, you’re going to need to reselect the images and perform another sync of them.
Instead of doing this, I would propose that you click on the off/on button to the left of the Sync button at the bottom of the Basic pane. The button will change from “Sync” to “Auto Sync”
Once that Auto Sync option is checked, any changes that you make to the image that’s selected to the list is automatically passed down to all of the other images in the series. No more re-syncing! You can now make the changes to the image knowing that all of the settings will be taken care of!
Hi, have synchronised photos to apply changes to all..doing jewellery photos, and now I want to export only one photo but all of them want to go! How do i just export one photo?
Sometimes the sync function doesn’t work any ideas?
Is there a way for auto sync to only record the net change in value, not the absolute value? I.e. if I just want to move the blue/yellow slider over by 200pts, or increase exposure by .10.
After syncing, is there a way to export individually without exporting the whole synced group?
Never mind! I figured it out 🙂
HI Misty,
how did you do it..I am stuck
Great tip, thanks. My work space with LR5 gives the “previous” button bottom right. Under settings, “Enable Auto Sync” is greyed. How do I enable?
Dah, found it.
AllenE mate, it is incredibly frustrating that you don’t explain how you “found it” because I have the same problem and I don’t know how to solve the issue. Who knew five years later you would annoy someone so much?
You just need to have more than one photo selected.
For the love of pete, though, be sure to turn the full Auto Sync button off immediately! That’s a nasty “Gotcha!” if you don’t.
That’s for sure!
Scott is right about turning it off! If you forget, you can make sooo many changes you didn’t mean to make! RC — is there any way at all to undo all those changes without stepping back through each one? deleting them from the history panel doesn’t have the same result even if all the same images are selected.
Great tip for improving productivity, thanks for sharing.
What about local adjustments and spot removals if any? Would they be auto-synced as well?
Yes, they get auto-synced to the others. Try something really obvious like a gradient that under exposes or blurs everything and you’ll see it applied. (hover your mouse over the others and watch the navigator window for a bigger image) If you don’t like it and do CTRL-Z, it will pull them back off as well.
Thanks Lyle.
Woow real killer tip … BIG time saver thanks RC, BTW waiting impatiently for the next episode 😉
Little things like this are like gold. Thanks RC…
I knew about Sync, but not Auto Sync. Thanks RC!
Nice one! Thanks for sharing, this is actually super useful as I keep modifying my base image and I have to re sync everytime.
Just don’t forget to turn it off when you’re done.