Keyboard Shortcuts for Photographers
Less is more…
There’s a lot of admin involved in being a photographer, but a good way to cut down your workload is by using keyboard shortcuts. Let’s have a look at all the options—both on your computer and your smartphone.
Computer
My 16” MacBook Pro
Like most photographers (and almost everybody else I know!), I spend a lot of time on my computer. That means speeding up my workflow can have a huge benefit.
Given the constant need to save photos to my computer, edit them, add metadata, export them, submit them to agencies and photo contests and keep track of it all on a spreadsheet, I’ve always tried to buy the fastest computer I can afford, and I currently have a November 2024 16” Apple MacBook Pro with an Apple M4 Max chip, 128 GB of memory and an 8 TB hard drive.
However, all that comes at a very considerable cost (!), and you can save time in other ways. One of the cheapest and most useful is to learn keyboard shortcuts. It doesn’t matter if you have a desktop or a laptop, a PC or a Mac, Lightroom or Photoshop—it’ll always be faster to use a keystroke or two rather than fiddling around in the menu system.
Unless you’re a complete technophobe, you’ve probably already learned quite a few computer shortcuts over the years, including the most common ones like Command or Control + S for Save, Command or Control + C for Copy and Command or Control + V for Paste.
Those generic time-savers are obviously useful, but let’s take a more detailed look at the programs you’re likely to be using as a photographer. Over the years, I’ve got to know programs like Adobe Lightroom Classic and Microsoft Excel very well, which means I’m aware of most of the keyboard shortcuts—although I had to relearn most of them all over again when I switched from a PC to a Mac!
Here are a few tips on using those programs.
Lightroom (or Lightroom Classic)
Lightroom keyboard shortcuts
Personally, I use Lightroom Classic on my MacBook Pro laptop to do almost all my photo editing, and one of the useful features is that you can see all the available keyboard shortcuts in each module simply by pressing Command + / (or Control + / on a PC). There’s also a useful set of graphics on Github.
You can find a full list in my Lightroom Shortcuts article, but here’s a summary of the main ones.
Library Module
G Enter Grid mode. This gets you back to the basic view of your images in the Library module, so you’ll probably find yourself using it every time you finish working on an image.
E Enter Loupe view. This makes the selected image full-screen while remaining in the Library module, so it’s very useful for checking or editing metadata such as the filename, title and keywords.
Command + Return Enter Impromptu Slideshow mode. This is quick and easy way of showing people a collection of images. I often have people looking over my shoulder when I’m editing my images on my laptop, whether I’m in a safari lodge or on a cruise ship, so it’s nice to be able to show people the best shots I’ve taken on the trip.
F Full Screen Preview. This shows nothing but the selected image and hides all the panels around the active window, so it’s useful for getting an overall impression of any changes you’ve made to an image.
1-5 Set ratings. Rating images on a scale of one to five stars is a good way to prioritise images. All you need to do is press the relevant numbered key, and you’re done!
6-9 Set color labels. The other way in which you can categorise images is using the colour labels. This is easy enough as the numbers 6-9 are reserved for Red, Yellow, Green and Blue. There’s no shortcut for Purple, so you’ll just have to right-click on the image and choose it from the Set Color Label menu.
` Toggle Flagged Status. A lot of people use P to flag and U to unflag a photo, but this is really the only one you need as it toggles on and off. Flagging a particular image as a ‘pick’ is helpful if you want to put together an off-the-cuff selection of images, and you can even filter on the flagged status or base a smart collection on it, so it’s very useful.
(By the way, I don’t recommend using X to set images as Rejected. That’s just a waste of time if you use the rating system as the unflagged photos are automatically ‘rejected’ and can easily be selected using the Unflagged filter and deleted after you’ve finished editing all your images.)
B Add to Target Collection. This is very handy for me when I do my weekly upload of 100 images to stock agencies. Once I’ve selected the images I want, I can simply tap the B key and send them all into a temporary collection that I call Latest Images, where I can work on them before exporting them into the right format for upload.
Command + Shift + I Import photos and videos. I used to use this shortcut all the time to import images, but I usually right-click on folders to synchronise them now as it’s a bit quicker.
Command + Shift + E Export. This is always my final step in Lightroom when I need a copy of my images to upload to my website, social media, stock agencies or competition websites or just to share with friends and family.
Command + Shift + C Copy Develop Settings/Command + Shift + V Paste Develop Settings. This is occasionally useful if you’re working with Virtual Copies or TIFF files that you’ve edited in an external program such as DeNoise AI, and you want them to look just like the original file.
Command + L Enable/Disable Library Filters. This is a handy way to cancel any filters you’ve been using.
Develop Module
V Convert to Black and White. This is obviously tremendously useful if you take a lot of black and white images, but I don’t!
Command + ‘ Create Virtual Copy. I tend to create sepia and black and white versions of all my five-star images, so this is a handy shortcut. A Virtual Copy is just that. It’s not a new file, just a ‘virtual’ one that you can edit in a different way. As Lightroom is a non-destructive program, all the edits are simply strings of instructions, so the Virtual Copy allows you to try out a different approach. You can always delete it later without having to worry about deleting the original file.
R Enter Crop Mode. Cropping is usually the first step in editing an image, and it’s easy to do by just pressing R. This is the first of six important local tools all in a row in the right-hand panel of the Develop module, and using them judiciously will give you a much better result than relying on global changes.
Q Enter Spot Removal Mode. This is a very useful tool for cloning out sensor spots or other distractions.
K Enter Adjustment Brush Mode. The Adjustment Brush allows very fine editing of local details in your image, and you can apply a whole host of different settings.
X Rotate Crop. This is very useful in a couple of ways, firstly if I want to change an image from portrait to landscape (or vice versa) and secondly if I just want to reduce the size of it. If you press X twice, the image will rotate and then rotate back at around half the size. That’s a great time-saver!
O Show/Hide Mask Overlay. This shortcut comes into its own when working with the Adjustment Brush and the Radial and Graduated Filters. It shows (and hides) the area affected by the brush or filter, and it’s very convenient to be able to turn it on and off, depending on the situation, especially if you’re making several different changes in a small area.
Excel
I used to work as a strategy consultant, and I’d often work 100-hour weeks or pull all-nighters developing sophisticated spreadsheet models, so I got to know Excel pretty well. I used to tell my analysts that if anything took longer than five minutes in Excel, they must’ve been doing it wrong!
As a photographer, it’s important to keep track of your images and where you’ve sent them, so I keep a master spreadsheet of every single photo with columns that flag all the most useful information, including which agencies have them and which photo contests I’ve submitted them to.
There are currently 162 columns in that database and over 35,000 records! That means everything takes just a little bit longer, but keyboard shortcuts can make your life a lot easier. There are so many, in fact, that I couldn’t possibly show you a graphic that shows them all, so it’s probably best to have a look online at a site such as myonlinetraininghub.
The main value of Excel as a productivity tool is the use of formulas. Those fall outside the scope of this article, but it’s worth knowing at least how to copy and paste your formulas to all the relevant cells—and that’s where keyboard shortcuts come in!
Here are a few typical tasks for wildlife photographers that can be speeded up dramatically.
Updating Species
Species names change every year, and if you’re trying to sell wildlife images through agencies, it’s a real pain having to update all your filenames, tags and other metadata! An easy way to speed up that process is to do a global replace in your master spreadsheet using Control + H. There are various options to narrow down your search and make sure you only change the right data, including Match case and Find entire cells only.
(Doing the same in Lightroom is more difficult as there’s no default option, but you can buy a plugin such as Search Replace Transfer to do the job for you.)
Checking Filenames
All stock agencies have rules and guidelines about the various metadata fields they require. For example, they might limit titles to seven words or 50 characters. When you have to rename thousands of files for submission, it’s inevitable that you’re going to make a few mistakes, so one way of checking that your filenames are consistent is to apply a formula in Excel.
Personally, I check every name to make sure it has seven words using the following formula (for anything in cell I10):
=LEN(TRIM(I10))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(I10," ",""))+1
Once I’m happy with the formula in the top row of my list, I can apply it to all the other filenames by using the Fill down command, which is Command or Control + D.
Matching Lists of Selected Files
Another example is when I have to flag files selected by my main stock agency, Design Pics. Again, I use a formula in the top row of my own list (K10) to check for the name of the file in the agency’s spreadsheet (called Selects.xlsx):
=VLOOKUP(K10,'/Users/nickdale/Downloads/Selects/[Selects.xlsx]Sheet1'!$A$1:$B$1000,2,0)
Once I’ve done that, I can again just fill down the data using Command or Control + D.
Phone
My iPhone 15 Pro Max
Text Replacement
I have an Apple iPhone to match my Apple laptop, which means some functions work across both devices. One of the most useful ones is Text Replacement, which lets you type a keyboard shortcut instead of a long string of words, eg lbr instead of lilac-breasted roller.
This is a godsend when I’m on safari as I like to keep a list of all the animal and bird species I see. If I had to type them all out letter by letter, I’d have no time to do my job of taking pictures! Instead, I can simply type in two or three letters in a new note on my iPhone, and the full name of the species will magically appear.
As it’s also an Apple product, the same applies to my laptop. Again, this is especially handy for species names. When I’m adding metadata to thousands of photos, it saves huge amounts of time to be able to use these shortcuts rather than having to type out the whole name of the species. I also use them for other common phrases, such as cu for Close-up of.
Over the years, I’ve compiled a list of dozens of text replacements. In fact, I even created a text replacement for text replacement so that I only have to type tr in my iPhone’s settings! Here’s the full list in the form of a plist file. If you want to use it yourself, you can simply import it to your Mac or iPhone. (Just search for the instructions on Google. That’s what I did!)
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
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