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Anonymous
May 5, 2011
Open for Voting

P: Allow for keyboard shortcut customization

Customizable keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom would be great. I just find it so confusing that crop and brush tools and things like that have such odd keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom. I understand that changing that all now would be awful for many existing users, but being able to override them like I can in Photoshop would be helpful. Doesn't anyone else out there find they use to wrong keyboard shortcuts in the wrong program?

    291 replies

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    J453
    Legend
    April 1, 2018
    John, as always, thanks for taking the time to clearly order stuff. I've shared this with the Lightroom team.
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    Victoria Bampton LR Queen
    Community Expert
    Victoria Bampton LR QueenCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 1, 2018
    > Provide a GUI user interface for editing the config file

    I could see this being done via Lightroom Web much more easily than integrating into Lightroom itself. Enter your desired shortcuts and download a config.lua file it outputs.
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    Victoria - The Lightroom Queen
    Victoria Bampton LR Queen
    Community Expert
    Victoria Bampton LR QueenCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 1, 2018
    I understand the frustration Martin, especially when it comes to the translations. You're not the only one frustrated by that, for sure.
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    Victoria - The Lightroom Queen
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    March 31, 2018
    Yeah, well, when talking about Adobe’s efforts on serving their customers it’s crazy that some non-English keyboard users are given shortcuts that simply do not work and require separate paid apps to function properly.
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    tjeerd paulj59535807
    Participating Frequently
    March 31, 2018
    True, that's why i mentioned keyboard maestro or better touch tool.These tools can map anything to anything on a application or global level.
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    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    March 31, 2018
    And, you can’t assign one-key shortcuts.
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    johnrellis
    johnrellis
    Legend
    March 31, 2018
    "You can remap anything in Lightroom in OSX keyboard"

    Macos Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts can only assign shortcuts to menu commands, and unfortunately, there are a number of LR keyboard shortcuts that don't correspond to menu commands.
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    tjeerd paulj59535807
    Participating Frequently
    March 30, 2018
    You can remap anything in Lightroom in OSX keyboard or using keyboard maestro, Better Touch Tool, Karabiner.
    You can always create macro's to compensate for the failures of companies like Adobe.

    This thread is not about custom keyboard shortcuts alone. It's about the current state of Adobe in terms of software development. 

    My current solution is the following:

    You uninstall Lightroom. 
    Cancel your subscription.
    Buy or Subscribe to Capture One.

    This software actually uses 2018 computer code and hardware and the color tools are amazing.
    You can even customize your food in it...
    Capture One will develop this software because it's all they have. ( and care about it and their customers )

    Adobe will never listen anyway, because they simply don't care. 
    Their stockholders and marketing department have their asses up in the cloud. 
    I will stop wasting my time and money on this company. Good bye.
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    chrisoaten
    Inspiring
    March 30, 2018
    Apple can do it (Aperture’s keyboard customization is excellent) but Adobe can’t/won’t. It’s pathetic.
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    johnrellis
    johnrellis
    Legend
    March 29, 2018

    I agree with Martin Hopf's observations about keyboard shortcuts for non-English languages.

    Adobe invests very little in this. For starters, there appears to be a complete lack of quality assurance, with elementary editing mistakes in other languages' TranslatedStrings.txt frequently released. For example, a quick search reveals this partial list:

    https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/x-keyboard-shortcut-is-assigned-to-two-functi...
    https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/x-keyboard-shortcut-is-assigned-to-two-functi...
    https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lr-2015cc-8-short-cut-x-to-reject-an-image-in...
    https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom-shift-x-no-longer-does-reject-and-n...
    https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom-classic-cc-keyboard-shortcuts-for-r...
    https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lr-classic-on-windows-the-shortcut-panel-in-d...
    https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/incrementtargetadjustmentvalue-does-not-work-...

    These bugs, though they're trivial mistakes, typically take two or more release cycles to fix. Most recently, it took five months to fix the broken rotate-photo shortcuts. And even then, Adobe neglected to fix the list of Library shortcuts in the Help menu, even though that was explicitly called out in the bug report.

    Ways that Adobe could improve the situation:

    1. Invest more in product management, documentation, and quality assurance of non-English shortcuts. This requires engaging experts knowledgeable in the supported languages and countries and their corresponding keyboards and then building an engineering process for maintaining and testing shortcut definitions, which Adobe apparently lacks. (TranslatedStrings alone is hardly sufficient.)

    This alone won't address the needs of languages used in multiple countries with differing keyboard layouts.

    Over the years, Adobe has not been able to implement solution 1 at an acceptable level of quality. It would be significantly cheaper for them in the longer run to simply improve the infrastructure for customizing keyboard shortcuts and rely on the user community for maintaining a diverse set of shortcut definitions for each language/keyboard combination. 

    A few simple, incremental, inexpensive steps would go a long way:

    2. Ensure that every keyboard shortcut is defined in a configuration file that can be edited by users, e.g. TranslatedStrings.

    3. Clean up the internal organizational mess in TranslatedStrings to make it easier to maintain. It currently looks and smells like a teenager's bedroom.

    4. Allow keyboard shortcuts to be defined in a config file separate from TranslatedStrings. This would make it easier to maintain and allow the community to more easily share shortcut definitions and avoid the accidental overwriting of the config files by LR updates. It would also allow the automatic generation of authoritative, complete documentation of shortcuts, which Adobe currently doesn't provide.

    5. Allow plugin keyboard shortcuts to be defined in the config file.

    6. Provide a GUI user interface for editing the config file.  Or just rely on plugin developers to provide such a utility (e.g. the next release of KB Tamer).  

    This combination of a clean config infrastructure, community-maintained keyboard layouts, and plugin-provided GUI would be a huge improvement over the current situation and would kill two birds with one stone: let users customize their shortcuts and provide much better support for non-English languages.  Faster, cheaper, better.

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