How to set the same aspect ratio on a group of images by padding

[opike99]

Hello,

I'm looking for a way in Lightroom to set the same aspect ratio on several images. And for those images that need to be adjusted, I'd like them to be padded rather than cropped.

[JP Hess]

What do you intend to "pad" them with? If you want them all the same aspect ratio, it seems to me that your only alternative is to crop out some of the unwanted part of the image. It's rather difficult to add or pad image data to an image unless you want to copy it to Photoshop and increase the canvas size and then copy part of the image to the blank canvas area. But that isn't something you would be able to do with just Lightroom.

[opike99]

Yes, my intention is to pad them with a solid color. The goal is to lose as little of the original images. Would I have to switch to photoshop to achieve something like this?

[JP Hess]

Yes. That is something that Lightroom cannot do.

[Jao vdL · Accepted solution]

If you have it, Lightroom Classic can do this fairly easily from the Print module.

[JP Hess]

Guess I'd better start thinking outside the box. Hadn't thought about that.

[opike99]

I do have access to LR classic. I'll go ahead and take a look.

[opike99]

I was able to achieve what I wanted by using the lightroom classic print module. Thanks everyone for the suggestions!

[p.ewing16]

A shortcoming of this solution is that we lose the image filenames.  Padding needs to be added to Export where the filenames can be retained.