Quick Access URLs

When I am using my plugins in my own work, I generally prefer to launch them using keyboard shortcuts, and most of them include what I call “Quick Access URLs”.

These are URLs but instead of “http://” or “https://” these links start with “lightroom://”, and Windows and Mac recognise “lightroom://” calls as commands which should be sent to Lightroom.

For more about this, see “How quick access URLs work” below.

There are other ways to use keyboard shortcuts to launch plugins, but these mainly target the menu names. Using this URL method is more flexible because it means that keyboard shortcuts can launch very specific features in the plugins.

As a practical example, Search and Replace has a feature called Refresh Workflow Filters which I use frequently when I’m keywording and captioning new photos. It lets me see important fields in the Library Filter and really helps me spot mistakes and inconsistencies and monitor my progress.

While I could run the menu command, then open Library Filter and choose my column preset, it’s much faster to use a Quick Access URL. So on my Windows PC I just hit the key combination Ctrl+F9 which runs Refresh Workflow Filter and displays Library Filter with certain columns. I do the same thing on Mac.

If you don’t like that shortcut, choose whatever combination suits you. F9 just makes me think “recalculate” – I used to use Excel a lot.

There are separate setup instructions for Mac and Windows below.

How quick access URLs work

This is not how I use them in practice, but if you want to see these lightroom:// keyboard shortcuts in action, let’s call some from here. Open Lightroom and ensure that Search & Replace 2.0 or later is installed, then return to this page and click this link:

lightroom://uk.co.beardsworth.findreplace/?action=main

Your browser should warn you about opening a non-standard link, and then Lightroom should display a brief message “Search + Replace is receiving instructions” before opening the plugin’s main dialog box.

That simple quick access URL simply opened the Search & Replace plugin, but an advantage of using these URLs is that you can also send parameters to launch specific features. For example:

• lightroom://uk.co.beardsworth.findreplace?action=transfer&source=title&target=location&method=replace copies the value of the title field into the location field, without displaying the Search & Replace dialog box
• lightroom://uk.co.beardsworth.findreplace?action=refreshfilter runs the Refresh Workflow Filters command and displays the Library Filter (as above)

Of course, you wouldn’t want to use your web browser to run Lightroom plugins (though you could!). You will need to set some up keyboard shortcuts on your Mac or PC, and there are many ways to do this.

Some people like using methods provided by the operating system, while others prefer specialist keyboard shortcut utilities.

 

Setup on Mac

While I have used Mac and Windows equally for the last 18 years, I’ve never really evaluated different ways to set up keyboard shortcuts on Mac, and there may be a better way.

But a kind user read this post when it was originally published and recommended I should try BetterTouchTool from https://folivora.ai/ .

After just 5 minutes of using it I’d got Cmd + Shift + 1 mapped to the Refresh Workflow Filters command.

From what I see, you can make a chain of these commands, so in Search + Replace it would be possible to perform a series of transfers between fields, then run Refresh Workflow Filters.

I still use it to create keyboard shortcuts for a variety of Lightroom and non-Lightroom tasks on my Mac.

Setup on Windows

On Windows, I like to set up Windows desktop shortcuts, and the simplest way is to drag the above link out of the browser window and drop it onto your Windows desktop, then edit it.

• Rename the shortcut and right click it to set the shortcut.
• You can choose whatever shortcuts make sense to you, and for example I decided I would have Ctrl+F9 as the shortcut which runs Refresh Workflow Filters.
• Be very wary of choosing shortcuts that clash with shortcuts built into LR or into other programs. For example, imagine I often use Photoshop’s “Render 3D Layer” command using Photoshop’s default shortcut which is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R. It wouldn’t make sense to choose that combination for my Refresh Workflow Filters shortcut.
• I recommend keeping the shortcuts on the Windows desktop or somewhere you can easily remember. Let’s say I forget my Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R is needed for something in Lightroom and am trying to figure out in Photoshop why Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R isn’t starting “Render 3D Layer”. Keeping the shortcuts on the desktop helps me remember what I did!