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Participant
August 9, 2025
Open for Voting

P: Modal dialogs should not completely halt export and other background tasks

  • August 9, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 70 views

Hello Adobe Team and Community,

I am submitting an idea to solve a critical workflow issue in Lightroom Classic: any modal dialog box completely pauses all ongoing background processes.

**The Problem (Description):**
When a long-running background task is active (like exporting thousands of photos, importing a large shoot, or building smart previews), a simple modal dialog box can appear unexpectedly. For example, the "Enable address lookup?" or a face detection confirmation. When this happens, the background task is completely halted and remains paused indefinitely until the user manually dismisses the dialog.

**Why Fixing This is Valuable:**
For any professional user, this is a major disruption. If I start a 5-hour export and step away from my desk, the entire process could be stopped 10 minutes in by a simple pop-up. This defeats the purpose of background processing and forces me to constantly monitor the application. It severely impacts productivity and makes it impossible to run essential tasks unattended (e.g., overnight).

**The Idea (Proposed Solution):**
I propose that non-critical notifications should be non-modal and should NOT pause essential background tasks. Possible solutions could be:
1. Display notifications as non-blocking pop-ups (toasts) in a corner of the screen that don't require an immediate response.
2. Create a "Notification Center" within the Lightroom UI where all these requests can queue up, waiting for the user's attention, while allowing background tasks to complete without interruption.

This change would be a massive quality-of-life improvement for all serious Lightroom Classic users.

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My System Info:
Lightroom Classic Version: Lightroom Classic version: 14.4 [ 202506051112-5918896a ]
Operating System: 15.6 (24G84)

1 reply

johnrellis
Legend
August 9, 2025

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In general, exports don't block when a modal dialog is displayed, e.g. 

 

So you might be observing a defect in a couple of particular dialogs. Even though I've done Preferences > General > Reset All Warning Dialogs, I'm not able to get modal dialogs to display for enabling address lookup or face confirmation to see if they block exports in my LR.  How do you get the enabling address lookup dialog to display?