Using the Presets Preferences to Find Missing Presets and Templates
A couple of weeks ago I was teaching a Lightroom workshop to a group of photographers in Eugene, Oregon. When we were going through a hands-on exercise on importing files, three of the students had a problem following my instructions. It seems that some of their file naming presets had gone missing. Fortunately, the same thing had happen to me several months ago so I knew how to solve this mystery.
This is what the file naming menu should look like.
One of the options in Lightroom’s Import Photos dialog is the File Naming options. This menu, shown on the right allows you to choose from a group of common presets for renaming your files as they’re imported. For some reason many of these templates can disappear from the list, leaving only two or three options.
If this happens to you follow these steps to recover the missing naming templates.
- Choose Lightroom > Preferences (Mac), Edit > Preferences (Windows).
- When the preferences dialog opens, choose Presets from the buttons at the top. When you do, you’ll see the dialog shown below.
- Choose Restore Filename Templates to reset the file name templates menu to its original options. Be aware that if you have custom presets that you’ve created, they won’t be shown.
Lightroom's Presets preferences allow you reset individual groups of presets
This ability to reset individual groups of presets and templates without affecting the others is a nice feature in Lightroom. Remember it whenever some of your presets or templates go missing.
