In my plugins you should see icons like this or a lightning flash, letting you copy the Quick Access URL for that feature. In this case, it opens Search & Replace at its Caption Builder tab.

When I am using my plugins for my own work in Lightroom, I generally prefer to launch them using keyboard shortcuts pointed at my “Quick Access URLs”.

These look like web browser URLs but starting with “lightroom://” instead of “http://” or “https://”. When Windows and Mac get “lightroom://” calls they recognise them as commands which should be sent to Lightroom.

Why?

It’s more common to use keyboard shortcuts to launch plugins by pointing the shortcut at the plugin’s menu names in the Plugin Extras menu.

Using this URL-handling method is more flexible because the plugin can provide many more ways of accessing its commands, doesn’t need long menus with odd names, and it means that keyboard shortcuts can launch very specific features in the plugins.

Example

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 review important fields in the Library Filter and really helps me spot mistakes and inconsistencies, and monitor my progress.

With Refresh Workflow FIlters I can check my metadata entry and see that I’ve overlooked 27 captions and forgotten to keyword 137 photos

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 with Cmd+F9.

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

There are separate setup instructions for Mac and Windows below.

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

 

My setup on Mac

While I have used Mac and Windows equally for the last 20 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 + F9 mapped to the Refresh Workflow Filters command.

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

So I recommend BetterTouchTool.

Setup on Windows

I prefer to keep these shortcuts on my Windows desktop, in fact over in a corner of my second screen

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!