Lightroom Classic: Allow for keyboard shortcut customization

It’s one of life’s great mysteries.

Open Letter to Adobe

Dear Adobe Management

The request in this thread is now 7 (seven!) years old now and still you keep ignoring it. Even more frustrating you force non US-Keyboard users into not working Shortcuts which are not even consistently localized or just faulty.

It is about time to help making you understand one tiny little thing in the relation between you and the subscribers of the CC (formerly known as "customers"). Let me explain.

Years ago, we just could decide if we liked the program and its functions and consequently buy it or not.  It was known to us what we well get as a customer before buying. And we had to beg for a function, see if you implemented it or not then decided whether to buy the next release or not. So far so good. A fair game.

But then, you, Adobe, decided to change the game. You forced us into a subscription model. As a user this means not being anymore able do buy something we know in advance what it might look like. We have to subscribe and sit and wait for which weird experiments you would abuse us to your Product Managers delight  (And you keep adding silly functions rather than solving the real issues). You chose this pace, you named the game. But the biggest decision you took when acting so was possibly not understood by your management: With this model you made silent and passive customers to STAKE HOLDERS which you can consider being the same as a share holder (You need to earn every single month our trust again so we decide every month to pay your fee).

And as we are your stake/share holders we do not want to beg anymore. We do not ask anymore and we do not want to be overheard anymore. We will just demand and you will have to deliver. That's what you chose, not we.

I strongly invite you to think about this. I am one of these, your, stake holders and I really would appreciate to get finally an answer to this topic. Any stake holder wants to know where the money he invests will go to.

I wish all of you a very calm easter period and and a little time for some reflections about how you could satisfy us users not your own product managers. We do not demand fancy consumer functions (again it was your decision to create the LR cc Branch of Products for this which I appreciate). So for LR classic this more then ever means: We expect you to finally deliver. A rock solid and fast production tool is what we expect from you. Time is up. Our patience also.

Make us happy again and deliver. This will keep us financing your company.  BTW: these days finally there is real and eye level competition out there, and I can tell you from personal experience: They DO listen to customers.

Best Regards
Martin 

I agree with Martin Hopf's observations about keyboard shortcuts for non-English languages.

Adobe invests very little in this. For starters, there appears to be a complete lack of quality assurance, with elementary editing mistakes in other languages' TranslatedStrings.txt frequently released. For example, a quick search reveals this partial list:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/x-keyboard-shortcut-is-assigned-to-two-functi...
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/x-keyboard-shortcut-is-assigned-to-two-functi...
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lr-2015cc-8-short-cut-x-to-reject-an-image-in...
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom-shift-x-no-longer-does-reject-and-n...
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom-classic-cc-keyboard-shortcuts-for-r...
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lr-classic-on-windows-the-shortcut-panel-in-d...
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/incrementtargetadjustmentvalue-does-not-work-...

These bugs, though they're trivial mistakes, typically take two or more release cycles to fix. Most recently, it took five months to fix the broken rotate-photo shortcuts. And even then, Adobe neglected to fix the list of Library shortcuts in the Help menu, even though that was explicitly called out in the bug report.

Ways that Adobe could improve the situation:

1. Invest more in product management, documentation, and quality assurance of non-English shortcuts. This requires engaging experts knowledgeable in the supported languages and countries and their corresponding keyboards and then building an engineering process for maintaining and testing shortcut definitions, which Adobe apparently lacks. (TranslatedStrings alone is hardly sufficient.)

This alone won't address the needs of languages used in multiple countries with differing keyboard layouts.

Over the years, Adobe has not been able to implement solution 1 at an acceptable level of quality. It would be significantly cheaper for them in the longer run to simply improve the infrastructure for customizing keyboard shortcuts and rely on the user community for maintaining a diverse set of shortcut definitions for each language/keyboard combination. 

A few simple, incremental, inexpensive steps would go a long way:

2. Ensure that every keyboard shortcut is defined in a configuration file that can be edited by users, e.g. TranslatedStrings.

3. Clean up the internal organizational mess in TranslatedStrings to make it easier to maintain. It currently looks and smells like a teenager's bedroom.

4. Allow keyboard shortcuts to be defined in a config file separate from TranslatedStrings. This would make it easier to maintain and allow the community to more easily share shortcut definitions and avoid the accidental overwriting of the config files by LR updates. It would also allow the automatic generation of authoritative, complete documentation of shortcuts, which Adobe currently doesn't provide.

5. Allow plugin keyboard shortcuts to be defined in the config file.

6. Provide a GUI user interface for editing the config file.  Or just rely on plugin developers to provide such a utility (e.g. the next release of KB Tamer).  

This combination of a clean config infrastructure, community-maintained keyboard layouts, and plugin-provided GUI would be a huge improvement over the current situation and would kill two birds with one stone: let users customize their shortcuts and provide much better support for non-English languages.  Faster, cheaper, better.

You can remap anything in Lightroom in OSX keyboard or using keyboard maestro, Better Touch Tool, Karabiner.
You can always create macro's to compensate for the failures of companies like Adobe.

This thread is not about custom keyboard shortcuts alone. It's about the current state of Adobe in terms of software development. 

My current solution is the following:

You uninstall Lightroom. 
Cancel your subscription.
Buy or Subscribe to Capture One.

This software actually uses 2018 computer code and hardware and the color tools are amazing.
You can even customize your food in it...
Capture One will develop this software because it's all they have. ( and care about it and their customers )

Adobe will never listen anyway, because they simply don't care. 
Their stockholders and marketing department have their asses up in the cloud. 
I will stop wasting my time and money on this company. Good bye.

Totally looking forward to not break my little brain while toggling between programs. I want to think that's not that hard to make available the option to choose "Photoshop like keyboard shortcuts". Adobe, please take note. Really frustrating!

I've been watching this thread for about 7 years. Not a lot of progress.

Well done Adobe. 

Adobe wake up; Lightroom has been overtaken by programs with no so much tradition like Lightroom. The shortcuts are plain stupid. My brain can't learn the both Photoshop shortcuts, and different ones for Lightroom. Capisci????

I'm glad this keeps coming up again. Lightroom, Camera Raw, and Bridge have all ignored our requests to customize shortcuts. I don't understand why. When the main programs all added customization, they were pushing for people to become aware that they could do this instead of complaining about a missing shortcut, or one that ran counter to the typical shortcuts other apps had adopted, but not these apps.

I realize it's not a JDI. It's a major feature, but it's not a trivial one to the users, either. Maybe first has to be performance, tethered shooting, and integrating better with its kissing cousins, but I'd hope that it's rather high on their priority list. I, anyway, could enjoy using LR more if the shortcuts made any sense to me.

Dear Jeffrey Tranberry

I was really glad to hear you as an Adobe Rep answering to this thread that you would  act on this

> I've shared this with the Lightroom team

8 months have passed now, I eagerly was hoping that the product LR Classic CC would now in its major new release 8 finally get beyond such issues and work properly. I like to ask here again if there will be any progress on this? If I somehow, (apart from my monthly money transfer  to you) can support this I'd gladly contribute - just let me.

Again - I really want to put a stress on the fact that I do not just ask for a fancy gimmick. I talk about the plain impossibility to use keyboard shortcuts on e.g. Swiss German Keyboards. I am ready and willing anytime to again report in any desired detail whatever you want me to and to work on this.

Thank you for a simple sign of life, wish you to have a great thanksgiving.

Adobe please.

Lightroom is fantastic but my efficiency is bottle-necked to a fairly extreme degree by this lack of shortcut configuration.

So many tools I frequently use require awkward movements. I use a big screen so moving my mouse to click on a tool requires a lot of arm and hand adjustment. If I use the (forced) default keyboard shortcuts I have to keep looking down at my keyboard to find the key, if it's not where my hand is resting comfortably I have to readjust.

Both of these points may sound trivial but the accumulated time and effort consumed by simply manoeuvring the application takes away so much from the experience. I find it really difficult to zone in and really make progress when I have to either readjust how I'm sitting to move the mouse across the screen, or turn on the light so I can see the keyboard.

Pleeeeeeeease Adobe! Please. It's. Been. 8. Years.

So much productivity can be set in motion by this simple change.

Please please please, add the ability to edit the keyboard shortcuts for Lightroom!  I customize my keyboard in AE, Premiere and Photoshop... why not have the same ability in Lightroom?  I don't mind learning weird shortcuts, but my most used features don't seem to have them at all and I always have to go to a menu... My #1 most used item - Open layers in Photoshop... As a Real Estate photographer, all day long I am doing this... 

How has it been 9 years since this post was made and still no way to customise shortcuts lol

would like a shortcut option for Changing: Exposure, Highlights, Contrast, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Clarity and etc... 

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Let people remap shortcuts because they are bugged..

Hello there,

I'm using Lightroom in English language (mostly to follow tutorials), on a French computer / keyboard.

A few shortcuts are not possible to use because this language missmatch :

In the English version of lightroom, the shortcut "before/after only" used to disable all the develop effects which is set on the backwards slash key (\) isn't usable at all.
Pressing this key on the French keyboard does a "-0.10" exposure because it's located on the "8" key, and pressing the key where this symbol is normally placed on an English keyboad does nothing at all.

The only way to make this shortcut work is setting Lightroom in French, and using the combination of keys "Shift+S" (which is by the way absolutely not close to the English shortcut).

I found topics that are almost 10 years old where people are facing the same problem, and a simple ability to remap the shortcuts would solve the problem.

It's really frustrating to not be able to use some important shortcuts, especially because of such a silly reason, and also knowing that in the other Adobe programs, it's either possible to remap all the shortcuts, and there aren't even such compatibility problems in the first place...

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Keyboard shortcuts !.

Hey, 

its 9 Years since we started this discussion. 

Now that we all pay for this product, can we pls get keyboard shortcuts? 

thanxs