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Ali5E882
Participant
July 17, 2025
Answered

Lightroom Classic v14.4 Missing User Presets

  • July 17, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 247 views

I recently had to get a new hard drive in my laptop and reinstall Lightroom Classic. My Lightroom catalog is corrupt so I am using a backup one that is a couple months old. I went to import photos and cannot find any of my user presets in the import window. I have looked for them in the develop window as well and they are not there. There is no option under "Manage Presets" for user presets. Any ideas what happened to them and where I can find them in Lightroom?

When I used this catalog last time, all of the presest were there.

Correct answer Conrad_C

If you restored only the catalog, presets will not be in there unless the option “Store Presets With This Catalog” was enabled in Preferences / Presets. When that option is not enabled (which is the default setting), presets are stored along with other user-specific Lightroom Classic settings in a subfolder of your user account, consistent with how other apps do it. 

 

So, if your presets were stored at the default location, you can restore those and other personal settings by doing this:

1. Get the previous drive you were using (hopefully it hasn’t been erased yet) or your most current complete backup before replacing the drive, and mount it on your computer. 

2. Refer to the Adobe help article at the following link. It tells you where the different user settings are stored, although for the specific question you asked, you want to scroll down to where it says “Presets and templates”. 

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/preference-file-and-other-file-locations.html

3. From your old drive or your backup, select any of the presets you want that are found at that location, and copy them to the exact same path on the new drive you installed. 

2 replies

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Conrad_CCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
July 17, 2025

If you restored only the catalog, presets will not be in there unless the option “Store Presets With This Catalog” was enabled in Preferences / Presets. When that option is not enabled (which is the default setting), presets are stored along with other user-specific Lightroom Classic settings in a subfolder of your user account, consistent with how other apps do it. 

 

So, if your presets were stored at the default location, you can restore those and other personal settings by doing this:

1. Get the previous drive you were using (hopefully it hasn’t been erased yet) or your most current complete backup before replacing the drive, and mount it on your computer. 

2. Refer to the Adobe help article at the following link. It tells you where the different user settings are stored, although for the specific question you asked, you want to scroll down to where it says “Presets and templates”. 

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/preference-file-and-other-file-locations.html

3. From your old drive or your backup, select any of the presets you want that are found at that location, and copy them to the exact same path on the new drive you installed. 

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 17, 2025

Presets are not stored in the catalog, but on your hard drive. Replacing the hard drive made you lose them, because apparently you did not restore the hard drive from a full backup. Do you have a hard drive (not a catalog) backup?

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
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