What's New in Lightroom Classic 14.0, Mobile & Desktop (October 2024)? | The Lightroom Queen (2025)

Lightroom Classic 14.0, Lightroom Desktop 8.0, and Lightroom Mobile 10.0 have all been released today. As Lightroom is subscription software, this isn’t a “big release” in the conventional sense. Adobe tends to update the main version number annually around the time of Adobe Max, and this year is no exception. Of course, new features have been released every few months, rather than having to wait for a single x.0 release.

Premium Classic Membersof our website,click here for even more details on the changes to Lightroom Classic (you will need to be logged in to access the link).

Premium Cloud Membersof our website,click here for even more details on the changes to Lightroom Ecosystem (you will need to be logged in to access the link).

In the last year, we’ve had (only main points listed):

Lightroom Classic, Mobile & Desktop:

• 13.1 (December 2023) – Added ITPC fields (Classic) and multiple bug fixes.
• 13.2 (February 2024) – Additional Filter & Sort Options, Flags written to XMP, Nikon Pixel Shift (All Classic).
• 13.3 (May 2024) – Healing became Remove Tools, with AI Remove added. Lens Blur is no longer Early Access. With Classic, a major Sync upgrade (requiring a Catalog Upgrade).
• 13.4 (June 2024) – Bug fixes and new lenses.
• 13.5 (August 2024) – (Classic) Updates to Sync Workflow, HDR support in Library, Edit in Ps Beta support.
• Numerous mobile and Lightroom Cloud-based improvements, as well as smaller features.

As many Develop/Edit features apply to all of the different app versions, we’ve continued to merge all of the updates into a single post, so here’s a quick reminder of what the different app versions are officially called…

New bugs…

• Classic – Subject Masks from previous versions are requesting an update (workaround – restart LR)

Important note for Classic: This release upgrades your catalog format, so just be aware that you can’t easily roll back to 13.x. You may decide to hold off updating to 14.0 until more general feedback is received.

System Requirements

The minimum system requirements for Lightroom Classic 14.0 and Lightroom Desktop 8.0 have been updated:

• Windows 10 v22H2 or later, or Windows 11 v22H2 or later.
• macOS now requires macOS 13.1 (Ventura) or later.
• Lightroom Classic 14.0 and Lightroom Desktop 8.0 are supported on macOS 15 (Sequoia) – but check our blog for further details as there are some macOS Sequoia bugs that affect Lightroom users.

Preview Management (Classic)

Are your Lightroom Previews taking up too much space? While you can discard 1:1 Previews after x days, until now there was no way to limit the Standard Previews. As so many people now have 4k and 5k screens, even Standard Previews can take up enormous amounts of space. Of course, for speed in the Library module it’s ideal to keep as many Standard Previews as possible.

In this release, there is a new option in the Catalog Settings dialog called Limit Preview Cache Size. This is a really helpful development! If you are short on space and can’t move the catalog and all its associated files to another drive (ideally SSD), it allows you to set the maximum amount of space you want to assign to Lightroom’s rendered previews, and Lightroom will do its best to stick to it.

Smart Albums (Desktop)

For some, the biggest news in this release… you can now save searches as Smart Albums on Lightroom desktop! Photos automatically appear in the Smart Album when they meet the criteria you set. For example, if you rate your best ever photos with 5 stars, and create a Smart Album with that criteria, it will automatically update as you rate additional photos with 5 stars. Unlike the Refine Filters and Search fields, you can choose whether to do an AND or an OR search. For example, find all photos that have both Charlie and Khush, or all photos that have either of them.

Edit in Third-Party Apps (Desktop)

As well as Photoshop, Desktop can now open photos in other editing apps.

Quick Actions (mobile & web)

As the name suggests, Quick Actions uses AI to help you quickly enhance subjects, blur backgrounds, retouch portraits, and make other edits based on the content of the selected photo. They’re shortcuts to existing tools to save you hopping around the different panels. It’s currently an Early Access tool on iPhone, Android, and Web, which means it’s a work-in-progress, and Adobe would love to hear what you think.

Presets (Desktop)

There are a few changes to presets on the desktop:

• The panel is now accessible in Grid view, which means you can now apply presets to multiple photos in one go!
• In Detail view, the Preset panel can now show presets as thumbnails.
• You can now mark presets as favorites by clicking the star icon. These presets show in the Favorites folder at the top of the Yours tab. You can’t currently set favorites on mobile or web, but the Favorites folder does sync from the desktop.

Generative Remove (All)

Generative Remove is now out of Early Access, and there have been several improvements to the Remove workflow.

On mobile, the main change is that Detect Objects has been added (previously calledObject Aware on Desktop).

On Classic & Desktop, the user interface for the Remove tool has been updated, resulting in a few workflow changes:

• The initial Remove panel view has been simplified in Remove mode and Heal/Clone modes.

• In Remove mode, the look of the Mask Refinement panel has been updated slightly, but the functionality remains the same.

• There’s a new Selected subpanel that allows you to edit or delete the selected repair.

• Object Aware mode has been renamed to Detect Objects. When Detect Objects is checked, you can now draw a rough circle around the object you want to select rather than painting more carefully around the object’s edge.
• Generative AI now automatically generates new variations when using Copy/Paste.

If you’re not getting the results you expect from Generative Remove, check our blog post Why does Lightroom’s Generative AI keep replacing objects instead of removing them?

Denoise Support (Classic & Desktop)

Denoise now supports linear raw file formats, including Apple ProRaw and Samsung ExpertRaw formats, sRAW and other reduced-dimension raw files, and files created by Merge to HDR and Merge to Panorama.

Apple Neural Engine support was added in 13.3, improving Denoise speeds on Silicon Macs. However, it’s been disabled again for now due to bugs in the engine that were causing quality issues.

Content Authenticity (All)

Already available on Lightroom Desktop (now moved from Tech Preview to Early Access), Content Credentials are now available on Classic and Mobile. The Content Authenticity Initiative is a large group of industry leaders working together to fight misinformation by adding verifiable, tamper-evident signatures to images. This allows anyone to trace the history of an image, including how it’s been edited, to help verify its authenticity. You can learn more about it at https://contentauthenticity.org

In Lightroom Classic, to include Content Credentials when exporting, set the file format to JPEG and set the Content Credentials pop-up to something other than Don’t Include.

In Lightroom Ecosystem, set the options in Preferences and then enable Content Credentials when exporting.

Filmstrip Badges (Desktop)

Stars and flags can now be viewed on thumbnails in the filmstrip.

HDR Improvements (All)

In Classic, there’s now a really handy new shortcut (Shift-H) to enable/disable HDR editing mode, and HDR now displays in the secondary window as long as Preferences > Performance tab > Enable HDR in Library is checked. The upcoming ISO 21496-1 standard gain map is now supported when exporting to JPG, JXL, AVIF, or TIFF formats. Gain maps provide information to software (e.g., a web browser) on how to optimally display the image on SDR and HDR screens.

In Desktop, Photos now show as HDR in the Merge to HDR and Merge to HDR/Pano dialogs.

On iOS and Desktop, videos captured in HDR are now played and exported in HDR.

Provide Feedback (Classic)

If you think you’ve found a bug, posting it on the Adobe forum is a good way to get it verified by others and reported to Adobe. We’ve written instructions here: How do I send a bug report or feature request to Adobe?

But if you’re convinced you’ve found a legitimate bug and want to send it to Adobe without any two-way dialog, there’s a new Help menu > Provide Feedback menu command, which sends your comments directly to Adobe.

Catalog Upgrade (Classic)

When you open Lightroom 14.0 for the first time, it automatically finds your default Lightroom catalog and asks for permission to upgrade it.

This release changes the upgrade process.

Previously, it created a copy of the catalog, renamed it using the name you chose in the upgrade dialog, and left the older catalog in the same folder.

From this release onwards, permission is still required to upgrade the catalog, but the following steps are slightly different:

1. Lightroom asks for permission to upgrade the catalog, as it did before. If you don’t agree to it, you can’t use version 14, so say yes!
2. Lightroom creates a subfolder called Old Lightroom Catalogs and saves a backup of the old catalog in this folder. The backup zip is renamed to add the date and time of creation.
3. Lightroom upgrades the main working catalog without renaming it. This should prevent the catalog names from getting longer with each upgrade. (Due to the old renaming, many people currently have catalogs with names like Lightroom Catalog-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-v10-v11-v12- v13-v13-3.lrcat, but see renaming below)
4. Lightroom opens the upgraded catalog.

If you need to roll back to the previous Lightroom version because of a workflow-busting bug, the restoration process has also changed slightly. Previously, you’d roll back the software, rename the previews to match the old catalog name, and double-click on the previous version’s catalog. Now you need to:

1. Move the current *.lrcat and *.lrcat- data files to another location (perhaps a subfolder).
2. Delete the * Helper.lrdata file (this is just a performance cache for the catalog).
3. Use the Creative Cloud app to install the previous version (e.g., 13.5), see rolling the version back.
4. Find the pre-upgrade catalog in the Old Lightroom Catalogs subfolder and unzip it.
5. Move it back into the main catalog folder alongside the existing Previews.lrdata and other related files.
6. Double-click to open it.
7. Go to Preferences > General > Default Catalog pop-up and ensure it’s set to Most Recent or the specific catalog of your choice.

For more details on catalog upgrades, see our blog post Why is Lightroom asking to upgrade my catalog and what does it do?

Renaming a Catalog (Classic)

Previously, to rename a catalog, you had to find it in Explorer (Windows) / Finder (Mac), quit Lightroom, and rename all of the individual files. As the number of files associated with each catalog has grown, this has become a bigger job, and it’s easy to make mistakes.

Lightroom now has a File menu > Rename Catalog command, where you can simply enter the new catalog name, and Lightroom will rename all of the files for you. If you like the catalog’s parent folder to match the catalog name, Lightroom can rename it at the same time.

It is smart enough to automatically update the default catalog path if Preferences are set to open a named catalog during startup. It also updates the backup path if the Backups folder is in the same location (although Where should I put my backups? shows why you probably want the backups in a different location).

Other New Features

• Classic
  • It’s now possible to Delete All Empty Masks from multiple selected photos at once using Grid view > Photo menu > Develop Settings, Develop module > Develop menu > Settings, or via the right-click menu > Settings.
  • Performance improvements focused on image-switching speed in the Library module when Preferences > Performance tab > Enable HDR in Library is checked, and image-switching speed in Develop module.
• Desktop
  • When adding stars or flags, you can automatically move to the next photo by enabling Photo menu > Auto Advance or turning on the Caps Lock key.
• iOS
  • Swiping through photos in the Device Detail view is now the default behavior and no longer requires the Tech Preview.
• Android
  • Presets containing AI masks now automatically update when applying. (This was already available on other platforms).
  • When in other apps, sharing a photo to the new Open in Lightroom option automatically imports the photos.

New camera support:

• Apple
  • Apple iPhone 16 Front Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Ultrawide Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Wide Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Plus Front Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Plus Ultrawide Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Plus Wide Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Front Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Telephoto Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Ultrawide Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Wide Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max Front Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max Telephoto Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max Ultrawide Camera
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max WIde Camera
• GoPro
  • GoPro HERO12 Black
  • GoPro HERO13 Black
• Panasonic
  • Panasonic LUMIX DC-S5D
• Click to view the full list of supported cameras

Newlens profiles:

• Apple
  • Apple iPhone 16 back camera 2.22mm f/2.2
  • Apple iPhone 16 back camera 5.96mm f/1.6
  • Apple iPhone 16 front camera 2.69mm f/1.9
  • Apple iPhone 16 Plus back camera 2.22mm f/2.2
  • Apple iPhone 16 Plus back camera 5.96mm f/1.6
  • Apple iPhone 16 Plus front camera 2.69mm f/1.9
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro back camera 2.22mm f/2.2
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro back camera 6.765mm f/1.78
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro back camera 15.66mm f/2.8
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro front camera 2.69mm f/1.9
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max back camera 2.22mm f/2.2
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max back camera 6.765mm f/1.78
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max back camera 15.66mm f/2.8
  • Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max front camera 2.69mm f/1.9
• Canon RF
  • SIGMA 30mm F1.4 DC DN C016
  • SIGMA 56mm F1.4 DC DN C018
• Fuji X
  • Viltrox AF 56mm F1.7 XF
• Go Pro
  • HERO12 Black
  • HERO13 Black
• Hasselblad X
  • Hasselblad XCD 3,2-4,5/20-35E
• Nikon Z
  • Viltrox AF 16mm F1.8 Z
  • Viltrox AF 40mm F2.5 Z
  • Viltrox AF 56mm F1.7 Z
  • Viltrox AF 75mm F1.2 Z
• SIGMA L
  • SIGMA 28-105mm F2.8 DG DN A024
• Sony E
  • Viltrox AF 56mm F1.7 E
• Sony FE
  • SIGMA 28-105mm F2.8 DG DN A024
  • Viltrox AF 40mm F2.5 FE
  • Viltrox AF 135mm F1.8 LAB FE
• Xiaomi
  • Xiaomi 14T Front Camera
  • Xiaomi 14T Rear Telephoto Camera
  • Xiaomi 14T Rear Ultrawide Camera
  • Xiaomi 14T Rear Wide Camera
  • Xiaomi 14T Pro Front Camera
  • Xiaomi 14T Pro Rear Telephoto Camera
  • Xiaomi 14T Pro Rear Ultrawide Camera
  • Xiaomi 14T Pro Rear Wide Camera
• Click here for thefull list of available Adobe Lens Profiles

New tether support (Classic only)

• Nikon Tether architecture has been changed and is now native on Apple Silicon. Relaunch in Rosetta mode is no longer required.
• Canon Tether SDK updated to support macOS Sequoia.

For Lightroom Classic, this release upgrades your catalog format, so just be aware that you can’t easily roll back to 13.5. You may decide to hold off updating to 14.0 until more general feedback is received.

See our instructions above for handling the changed Catalog upgrade.