Syncomatic is my plugin that syncs metadata and adjustments between files with similar names or within stacks. But one thing has annoyed me ever since I wrote it 6-7 years ago – it couldn’t sync the crop.

I always wanted to do it – why wouldn’t I? – but for reasons best known to themselves Adobe didn’t make crop available and it’s been even more painful since I heard people were using it for a raw+JPEG workflow involving Lr Mobile.

Sadly, possible workarounds involved techniques I disliked, or relied on undocumented features in Adobe’s SDK, and would trigger large and unnecessary backups. And none seemed reliable anyway. So I just kept the idea on my to-do list.

Finally when Lightroom 6 came out someone noticed it included a second SDK method to apply adjustments, so I dug around and saw that it included crop settings. The method is undocumented, and it does only work in Lr6, but it works well enough for crop support to be added in version 2.19 which I have uploaded here ahead of a normal release.

Because it uses undocumented code which I’ve had to figure out, cropping may not be synced correctly in every circumstance, and portrait orientation photos present more difficulties. I’ll continue to work on this area but I may not be able to help you if it doesn’t sync crops correctly for every photo. Still, the worst that can happen is that it may apply an incorrect crop, or none – which seems preferable to never syncing any crop!