# Synchronise presets and other settings between two computers



## Arrow (Jul 20, 2015)

I'd appreciate advice as to the best way of syncing settings and presets between two computers. e.g. print, export presets, grid filters etc.

Both my photos and catalog are stored on a USB 3 external drive and backed up to NAS and external drive (kept off site) using FreeFileSync. Work on both a desktop and laptop using Lightroom 6 desktop version.

I find that the external drive works very well for me with good performance but I'd like to have the same environment on both desktop and laptop. Currently I do all importing, printing, exporting and publishing from my desktop because I have been caught out by having e.g. the wrong destination folders on laptop import.


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## clee01l (Jul 20, 2015)

In your one LR catalog there is a preferences option to "Store Presets with Catalog" If this is checked, LR will create an empty catalog named "Lightroom Settings"  All of you LR presets need to be stored here.  It is also a good idea to create a plugins folder here too and store all of your active LR plugins here and register them with the LR Plugin Manager. 
The "Lightroom Settings" folder is the 'local' location for presets. LR uses either the 'local' location or a global location but not both.  Until now, you probably have been storing your LR presets in the global location.  Yowill need to copy them to the local location, the  "Lightroom Settings" folder. The global presets folder are located in the"Users/[user name]/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Lightroom" folder. You will need to copy them to the local location, the  "Lightroom Settings" folder. 
Once you have set put the preferences file on one machine to the above specifications, you need to copy the preferences file to the other  computer. The Preferences file is located in "C:/Users/[user name]/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Lightroom/Preferences/".

Not all of the presets are stored in the local folder. Some like the folders for Email Accounts and Email Address book will always be accessed from the global location from each machine. But storing the presets with the catalog will take care of most of your need to synchronize.


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## Jim Wilde (Jul 21, 2015)

clee01l said:


> In your one LR catalog there is a preferences option to "Store Presets with Catalog" If this is checked, LR will create an empty *catalog* named "Lightroom Settings"  All of you LR presets need to be stored here.  It is also a good idea to create a plugins folder here too and store all of your active LR plugins here and register them with the LR Plugin Manager.



Cletus meant to say "folder", rather than "catalog".

I agree with the suggestion regarding creating a "plug-ins" subfolder in the "Lightroom Settings" folder hierarchy, but be careful as IIRC the Nik set of plug-ins installs by default into the default Lightroom folder.


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## LouieSherwin (Jul 21, 2015)

Hi,

I use DropBox to synchronize all my Lightroom presets. On Mac OS is it easy to do using symbolic links on each computer to point to the new location. I believe that symbolic links or a similar function is available in Windows but I'm don't have the specifics for how to implement it. In any case 

In the Lightroom preferences on the Presets tab you can use the "Show Lightroom Presets Folder..." to find where these are all stored. On my Mac the presets live in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom. (The tilde "~" is the Unix shortcut for your home directory)

Copy this entire folder to a private folder in your Dropbox folder. I copied this folder to ~/DropBox/Shared Libraries/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom. 

Then replace the original folder with a symbolic link to the folder in DropBox. 

This is how to do it in Mac OS. I use the command line in the Terminal app.


```
cd ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe
mv Lightroom LightroomOLD
ln -s ~/DropBox/Shared Libraries/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom
```

The mv command is the Unix rename command so that the ln -s will create the new symbolic link with the same name.

Hopefully someone can provide the equivalent commands to do this in Windows.

-louie


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## Victoria Bampton (Jul 22, 2015)

http://www.lrq.me/winsymlink is the easy way on Windows and http://www.lrq.me/macsymlink  is the easy UI way on Mac. (These are just short links to external sites that are easier to keep updated!)


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## Arrow (Jul 24, 2015)

Thanks for the helpful replies. I decided to save settings with the catalog. Copied across the folders and preferences file and all seems to be working good.

Stefan


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