Auto Settings not Applying to All Selected photos in Lightroom Classic

Forum|Forum|1 day ago
August 23, 2026
4 replies
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I am using Lightroom Classic on my Mac Studio on Tahoe 26.5.2. I select all photos in the album, turn on Auto Sync at the bottom of the Develop tab on the right, then select Auto. It applies to all the photos that I can see in the tray at the bottom but no more. I have to scroll over to reveal more at the bottom and then it will apply to those now showing, I can see them changing in the thumbnail, which takes several seconds, then I repeat. Since I can only show 18 photos at a time in the tray, I have to do this a ton times.

This works totally fine for other manual adjustments like color balance or contrast, if I change any other setting with auto sync on, it applies to every photo selected. I’ve tried auto on all and just leaving the computer without doing anything else and it still does nothing, only applies to the photos I can see ion the tray. I left it overnight, came back and it still had not applied to them all, I scrolled over and it was now applying to those I revealed in the tray.

This has been the same for as long as I’ve used Lightroom which is 5+ years. This really needs to be fixed. If anyone has a workaround please please tell me. This is such a massive waste of time, especially when I have 300+ photos to edit and I have to slide through 18 photos at a time to get the auto settings applied.

johnrellis

Legend

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@Spectrolaroid It would still be great to have this work when in develop if you have a CPU that can handle the load, similarly to how AI denoise can operate in the background while I go through selecting images or editing other photos.

Agreed. When the current Auto was introduced in LR 7.1, it was computationally much more expensive relative to the typical computer speed, and LR didn’t have the notion of computing such things in background.

You could try the Build Previews In Background command of the Any Source plugin, which will build standard or 1:1 previews in background after applying Auto to a batch of photos. It’s not perfect, with some users finding it useful and others not.

johnrellis

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I replied to your other post but my reply seems to have disappeared, grrr.

@dj_paige It may be that simply the thumbnails in the filmstrip don’t generate immediately, but the Auto function is applied properly to the photos.

That’s exactly right. LR applies Auto immediately, but it defers the computation of the individual slider settings and the rendering of the previews and thumbnails until the photos are visible in the UI.

To force the computation of the actual slider settings and generate the new previews and thumbnails, after applying Auto, go to Library Grid view. With all the same photos selected, do the menu command Library > Previews > Build Standard-Sized Previews.

Note that you can also apply Auto in Library Grid view, using the Auto button in the Quick Develop panel. This is a little safer than using Auto Sync in Develop, because so many people at some point forget to turn off Auto Sync and don’t notice until it’s too late.

S

SpectrolaroidAuthor

Participant

Thanks for the replay. I gave this a try and it worked.

I opened up another batch of 165 raw (NEF) photos and applied auto settings to all of them in the develop panel with Auto Sync on. I went back to Library and hit Library > Previews > Build Standard-Sized Previews. This took a while to complete but it finished and it did apply to all images. At least it’s a reliable way to get them all done and also have a progress bar to show it’s being done.

It would still be great to have this work when in develop if you have a CPU that can handle the load, similarly to how AI denoise can operate in the background while I go through selecting images or editing other photos. That just reduces the linear editing by being able to work on the next step while the previous step is in progress, and saves a lot of time, but this will still be extremely helpful and I will use it moving forward.

Thank you!

dj_paige

Legend

I just tried using Auto (with Auto Sync turned on) on a folder of over 150 files, they all got the Auto modification, appearance changed and Auto Setting is the most recent step in the History Panel. I did not have the filmstrip visible.

Please check the History Panel to see if the edits were applied to all of your 300+ photos. It may be that simply the thumbnails in the filmstrip don’t generate immediately, but the Auto function is applied properly to the photos.

P.S. There are no “albums” in Lightroom Classic. Not sure what that means.

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