P: Ability to assign a second monitor with more than 3 monitors

Adobe has been aware of this problem for more than 4 years now, their "Chief Customer Advocate" has merged any other similar bug reports into this thread, but they have done exactly NOTHING to remedy the situation. See the thread immediately below: 'It hasn't risen to the top of the list to implement support for more than 2 monitors'. So either we are in the distinct minority, or Adobe knows how we need to use their software better than we do, and that is with only 2 monitors in our workstations.

The arrogance and lack of feedback from Adobe is appalling, it would appear they don't care that their product has a persistent problem across multiple major releases (3.x-6.x) since the issue is the same as first reported more than 4 years ago. It's not like we're hacking their software to do something it wasn't originally intended to do, we're just trying to use a feature that is poorly implemented when there are more than 2 monitors present, which as you note is NOT such an exotic setup among working professionals in this day and age. The only "solution" Adobe has offered is a workaround, not a fix: drag the secondary display window around and re-size it each and every time LR goes daffy and forgets where we had it last, which for me at least happens EVERY day. Pretty absurd, and why I personally refuse to buy into this subscription model they keep trying to box us into which would seem to reward them for doing nothing to fix their product month after month.

And thank you for the kind words on my photo, they are much appreciated!

This is a very good point.

I don't see how any serious photographer can work on portrait photographs without at least one portrait oriented monitor. In fact, I can't see how anyone can work a computer at all without at least one portrait oriented monitor... The Portrait / Landscape issue alone is MORE than enough justification to implement a better way to select what is displayed on each monitor... especially considering that almost all modern monitors are 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios... working on a 9:16 photograph on a 16:9 screen is just ridiculous.. we NEED to switch monitors MANY times during an edit and freely change from portrait to landscape monitors so we can see what we're doing work efficiently without a lot of doodling around with monitors... Heck I move my web browser between my portrait and landscape monitor 40 times a day... actually MOST websites look better on a portrait monitor, but some need a landscape monitor.

Also since Adobe now supports GPU processing, and any serious graphics card supports 4 monitors, I don't see why we can't use lightroom on 3 or 4.. or 8 monitors at the same time.. let us decide what is on each screen.. even duplicate things on screens.. just put a little icon like the 1 or 2 we have now for each monitor available up to 8, since supporting 8 monitors is so easy on modern hardware... and let the user select a function for each... it's so simple to program it to do this, and would make the product much more professional.

By the way, nice photo in your example 🙂

Almost ALL graphics cards worth a darn these days have outputs for 4 monitors, (my system supports 8 monitors, two GPU cards with 4 monitors each.. and I currently use 6 Monitors) So why are we all STILL having these issues?? You simply can't push Shift-F11 then drag the secondary monitor to whatever you want then push shift-F11 again to make it full screen on THAT monitor... Trying to resize the secondary preview is just not the same as having it full screen on that monitor, and you all KNOW it. When you are working on your photos, you don't want that border around it, you want your photograph surrounded by BLACK. Also if you move the main program to another monitor, the 'secondary' display moves somewhere else, there is NO control. This is ridiculous that this has been an issue for SO long when it's SO easy to fix from a programming standpoint. Dual monitors are nothing new, the original IBM PC supported dual monitors, once color, one monochrome, and there has NEVER been a time when there weren't dual monitors. Dual monitors have been out since the 80's that's DECADES of dual monitors.

I MUST point out one thing...
If you are working on a portrait view photograph, You MUST use a monitor that is also in Portrait mode, otherwise you are just NOT able to get a proper full screen view of the photograph. this is ESPECIALLY true on all the modern wide screen format monitors.. Almost ALL monitors are now 16:9 or 16:10 and all professional cameras take 4:3 photos, so looking at a 3:4 portrait mode photograph on a 16:9 monitor is just ridiculous. If you are on a 16:9 monitor, looking at a 3:4 portrait mode photo, you are only using 42% of your screen and on a 1080p monitor you are only looking at 810 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high, where as if you have a portriat view monitor, you get the full 1080 pixels wide by 1440 pixels high.. thus using 75% of the screen... quite a major difference!! if you have a 10:16 vertical monitor, then you could get the full 1200 pixels wide by 1600 pixels high, utilizing 83% of the monitor... the same as looking at a 4:3 photo on a 16x10 horizontal screen. If you have 4K monitors, the percentages are the same, and so why would ANYONE look at a portrait photograph on a landscape screen, why not have the maximum resolution possible for the task?
Those of us who are Professional photographers ALWAYS have at least one portrait oriented monitor for this purpose. Changing your Loupe Veiw monitor or Full screen edit mode monitor back and forth between the portrait mode monitors and landscape mode monitors is ESSENTIAL for REAL photo development and editing, by not allowing this simple feature you can putting lightroom in a lower class of product than it should be.

While we're on the subject, why is lightroom limited to TWO monitors, why not use 3 or all 4? Personally I would like one monitor showing the 'Full Screen with Menubar, a second showing a grid view, and a third showing Loupe View.. and as mentioned, I would like to easily change what is displayed on my portrait monitors and what is displayed on my landscape monitors, and swich which is which quickly and easily. Why not allow this??? Everything needed is already programmed, and Adobe needs to do is TURN IT ON.

The BEST way to implement which monitor is which is to just ASK which monitor you want to use for each display the same way virtualbox does for full screen windows, just select View and select which screen you want that to display on.. SIMPLE . Just put 8 little screens at the bottom instead of only two and let the user display what they want or weather to show displays or not. Allow Duplicate displays, because many times in a studio, 2 displays are facing the client, one portrait and one landscape, by allowing duplicate displays you could prepare a portrait slideshow and then when you are ready, turn on client view portrait display and start the slide show, then later, you can turn that monitor off, prepare a landscape slideshow, and turn on client landscape monitor and show that.

Now if you Adobe guys want to do some REAL programming, make it intelligent, and always alllow an option to select which monitors show portrait views and which show landscape views, and which show both.. then while working the portrait view photographs would just show on the portrait monitors and the landscape views would show on landscape monitors, and slideshows with mixed landscape / portrait photos would switch to the appropriate monitors as needed. Being a programmer for the last 35 years, I can tell you there is NOTHING complicated about this kind of functionality... heck even video games do it... Certainly a professional level photography product like Lightroom should do it.

Being able to control where the 2nd monitor is ok, but I would prefer to be able to put windows wherever I want on any number of screens I have (kind of like Visual Studio). I understand that Lightroom is different than say something like Visual Studio in that it connotes workflow, but some solution ought to be able to be worked out. As for priority, I think it's an expectation thing for a certain class of user. Those who have multiple monitors are generally used to being able to get apps to work in that environment without having to resort to help. In my experience, experimentation resulted in failure. Then I couldn't find a quick fix so I ignored it for a while. Finally, I got annoyed to the point of "I will find a fix for this", and I found this topic after some searching. I was surprised to find that multi-monitor support is a technical deficiency in Lightroom rather than me not getting the zen of the product. I generally I have a high opinion of Adobe as a company and as an implementer of software. I feel this is an area where you could raise your game; no one likes those "oh that's weak" moments when using their beloved software. By the way, should title read: "Lightroom: Ability to assign a second monitor with more than 2 monitors" instead of "3"?

Yup, +1 for this please! Mind you, only 17 people like this idea, so I'd guess that not everyone has upvoted it? If everyone who has contributed to this thread votes, and everyone on the other threads I've seen come here and do the same, then maybe.... 😉

Please Adobe, fix this! I want to use the secondary display where I want, not where LR wants!

This isn't a bug. It's just basic functionality that is missing. That has been missing for years despite being brought to their attention.

You cannot full screen the secondary display on a display of your choosing.

It's the same reason why Adobe has extremely poor performance converting Fuji RAWs and despite having been brought to their attention- refuses to address the issue.

And that reason boils down to: Marketshare.

Honestly how many LR users are using 3 monitors?

Not enough for them to care.

It's possible. It hasn't risen to the top of the list to implement support for more than 2 monitors.

Can this be fixed? Will this be fixed? First report of issue was in LR 3.5, 3+ years ago. Latest post to thread indicated same issue in LR 6.x as of 2+ weeks ago. I can't speak for the others who have posted here, but I don't regard the application's behavior in this fashion as a feature. Some update of some kind would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

You're describing the same feature here. Wanted to add your vote.