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blakeyuckert
Participant
June 12, 2024
Question

Arrow Keys Stop Working Mid-Session within Lightroom Mac

  • June 12, 2024
  • 4 replies
  • 2889 views

For reference, I am using Lightroom Mac Version 7.3 on an Apple M1 Pro MacBook Pro.

 

Has anyone had an issue where during the middle of of an editing session the arrow keys stop working on the film strip and when adjusting something on a sliding scale? All of the other keyboard shortcuts work, but for some reason arrow key function stops.

 

This issue will resolve upon quitting and restarting application, but it is getting annoying & breaks my flow when I have to do so 4-5 times throughout an editing session. This has been bothering me for months now. How do I resolve it?

 

It generally seems to occur after I have used the crop function (or at least that is when I notice). When it happens, it will not allow me to hit enter on the crop. I instead have to hit 'E' to return to the edit panel and save the crop. From that point going forward, I can no longer use the arrow keys throughout the session. There is also a sound that plays like the arrow keys are no longer a valid key entry when I try to use them, which you can hear in the screen recording attached.

 

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

    4 replies

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    default6j8fnapu6u10
    Participant
    February 15, 2026

    2026 update: I still have the same issue, quite regularly. It’s been more than a year...

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    P29316325sj10
    Participant
    January 10, 2025

    Is there any resolve for this? I have now spent weeks trying workarounds. for this. Adobe are WELL aware of this bug - it's now been going on for months and there are thousands of pages with people screaming about this all over the internet, not to mention Adobes OWN forum. Ah well if it's not fixed soon it renders Lightroom completely unuseable for me so I'll be cancelling my subscription. Bizarre that a company such as Adobe can't even address this issue.

     

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      hookenwekken
      Participant
      February 23, 2025

      This is incredibly problematic. I add some key works, color correct, and then use the arrow key to advance to the next where I delete or rate. Every 5 minutes, I get the plop sound when I try to advance or go back using the arrow key. What it going on here? It's a miserable interruption to workflow. Why do I have to wrestle with Lightroom? @adobe please fix it immediately via prioritizing in your backlog. 

       

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        fbourdoncle17340251
        Known Participant
        February 23, 2025

        It is scandalous for a software of a company like Adobe (not to mention the price of the subscription). What is really the problem? Do your testers actually, you know, test? Do they use the software as the rest if us do? Because if so, it only takes a half hour of actuall work to discover problems all over the place : 1/ wrong cursors (most problematic with tools like healing if you can't see the region that you are selecting) 2/ when selecting with the brush (for instance) if for some reason you move the cursor in a place where you should not (not even sure I can describe the problem precisely) then the mask that you are creating disappears mysteriously 3/ keyboard focus becomes broken (one of the symptoms being one described in this post) and it becomes sometimes impossible to search in the search bar (all characters suddenly interpreted as editing commands) and I could go on for hours. BUT: I have work to do and I am tired of paying for a pertual beta software that I am helping debug. Offer me the subscription and I will eventually help you (being a veteran software eningeer myself). Otherwise please pay a decent QA teams and/or fire the "buggy" software engineers and/or slowdown the pace of innovation to fix the bugs first. 

        Jason Abbott
        Jason Abbott
        Known Participant
        November 8, 2024

        This began happening to myself and many others (reporting on Reddit) after the latest update to LR 8.0 (20241003-1027-def78b5) on MacOS.

        It can happen as often as every five minutes, requiring a restart of Lightroom in order to "unblock" the use of arrow and other shortcut keys, and continue working. It is exasperating.

         

        There isn't much I can share in the way of screenshots or recordings since it's just me tapping on the keyboard and hearing the OS "can't do that" sound.

         

        It is unrelated to caps locks. I tried a lot of key modifiers to avoid the need to restart (shift-arrow, cmd-arrow, etc.) and nothing "unsticks" it except the restart, unfortunately.

          Jason Abbott
          Jason Abbott
          Known Participant
          November 8, 2024

          After a good bit of both editing and applying keywords today, I've observed that I can edit for a couple hours without the shortcut keys failing. But when adding keywords, they stop working almost every other photo.

           

          By that I mean, I'm moving through a set of some hundreds of photos, using shortcut to pick/reject, and also adding extra keywords to the picks before hitting forward arrow. I can only make it a couple photos at a time this way before needing to restart LR.

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            fbourdoncle17340251
            Known Participant
            November 12, 2024

            Yes, same for me. I keep restarting LR, but not only because arrow keys stop working, but also because sometimes the cursor (and mouse action) stops working as required by the selected tool. For the healing tool (for instance, bu it works with most other like reframe), the displayed cursors can be the hand cursor, instaed of the circle, and clicking works as the hand, not as the healing tool. Restarting is the only option.

              S
              Shivani Somayajula
              Participating Frequently
              June 25, 2024

              Hi blakeyuckert. Welcome to Lightroom Community. I'll help you figure.

               

              Please check if caps lock is on or off. Does it behave differently if the caps lock is on or off?

               

              Let us know if this helps. 

              Regards, 

              Shivani 

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                limosa37825535eedv
                Participant
                July 4, 2024

                I have the same problem. (M1 on mac mini, sonoma 14.5) Since a couple of days, when using the arrow keys I get the "plop" error sound instead of lightroom showing me next photo in the film strip. Only in edit mode - in grid view the arrows work fine. Driving me nuts, please advice.

                Diederik

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                  benrubin
                  Participating Frequently
                  November 1, 2024

                  Same problem here. Lightroom 8.0 (not Classic), MacOS Sequoia 15.0.1.

                  So annoying! I need to quit every few minutes to get the arrow keys to work again. 

                  Is there another workaround or key combo that will restore arrow keys without quitting?

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