Tip of the Day: Snapshots - Lightroom

Today’s tip is a little known or under-utilized feature in Adobe Lightroom. This feature is extremely powerful, and in terms of version management, allows a users to do multiple edits and inspect the process at different stages.

Snapshots allows you to save a state of your workflow at any point during your workflow. You can start with an original and create as many ‘snapshots’ as you like.

Simply click on the + symbol on the panel located in the default left side of your develop module, then name your Snapshop, and hit create.


You can also add snapshots at any point of your workflow. By going through your History palette which is located underneath the Snapshots, select the point of editing that you were last happy with, and then proceed to click the + beside the Snapshots heading to lock in a state.


You can also at any point update a snapshot with any new adjustments if you don’t want to create too many snapshots. Right click over the Snapshot and select the ‘Update with Current Settings’ pull down. Because this does not take any real memory on your hard drive, I don’t necessarily find this a benefit, but it’s there if you like to keep the amount of states down to a minimum.