Auto Settings not Applying to All Selected photos in Lightroom Classic

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​@rrife1 I don’t need your snark. Its a similar issue. I pay $60 a month to have to “work around” some ridiculous “bug” that literally showed up out of nowhere. I use LRC daily and dont have time for asinine workarounds when I have clients waiting for images. Appreciate your smart*ss response though. 

Why is it snark to factually disentangle completely unrelated posts and alert you to  a workaround to a longstanding bug that Adobe has left unfixed for four years?

The original post described applying Auto to a batch of photos and LR not updating the thumbnail previews until they actually scroll into view. The Develop settings applied by the batch Auto remain unaffected. The user has to wait a few seconds each time they scroll, waiting for the previews to update.  

Your post describes much different behavior. After applying Auto to a batch of photos and then applying a change in Exposure to the batch, many of the photos lose the Develop settings computed by Auto. No amount of waiting by the user will recover the lost settings. Adobe acknowledged this as a bug in that other thread in 2022.  

Why do you think those two issues are similar? Do you think it is helpful to future readers to leave two such dissimilar issues conflated in a single thread? 

I understand you’re frustrated by an outstanding bug. But I don’t work for Adobe. I do submit, refine, and confirm a large number of bug reports here, making it more likely the developers will be able to reproduce them and eventually fix many of them.

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​@rrife1 I’m having the exact same issue. Mine was with 70 photos. I applied auto settings to all in the Develop panel. That was successful, however, when I wanted to adjust the exposure on all images to the same exposure, selected all and applied that exposure, it reverted all the other images with the exception of the first and last 16 images back to before the auto exposure. This is massively frustrating. I thought maybe that the settings had applied but when i exported them it had clearly not done the auto on the whole middle chunk of images, just the first and last 16

These are different symptoms than those reported by ​@Spectrolaroid, not the “exact same issue”. In your case, the actual slider settings set by the batch Auto are getting reset back to pre-Auto settings by the batch change to Exposure.  In the symptoms reported by ​@Spectrolaroid, LR is just deferring the building of previews until the user scrolls the thumbnails into view.

Looks like you’re tripping over this years-old bug that hasn’t been fixed:

https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-674/p-syncing-develop-settings-to-a-large-batch-of-photos-can-wipe-out-the-previous-settings-of-a-batch-663817?postid=7160733#post7160733

Try the precise steps of the workaround included at the end of that post. I haven’t retested it since 2022, so I don’t know if it still works. But note that the workaround involves going to Library and using the Quick Develop panel to apply a preset, not applying the preset in Develop with Auto Sync.

I’m having the exact same issue. Mine was with 70 photos. I applied auto settings to all in the Develop panel. That was successful, however, when I wanted to adjust the exposure on all images to the same exposure, selected all and applied that exposure, it reverted all the other images with the exception of the first and last 16 images back to before the auto exposure. This is massively frustrating. I thought maybe that the settings had applied but when i exported them it had clearly not done the auto on the whole middle chunk of images, just the first and last 16

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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.

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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.

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.