How to install XMP presets in Lightroom Classic

The normal way

1. Open Lightroom Classic and switch to the Develop module (D).
2. In the left panel, find the Presets header and click the + icon on its right.
3. Choose Import Presets…
4. Select your .xmp files — or a .zip containing them — and click Import.
5. The presets appear in the left panel under the group name stored inside the file, or under User Presets if none was set.

The better way for mixed bundles

Preset packs often ship presets and profiles together, plus the occasional lens profile. The Presets panel only takes presets. Use File → Import Develop Profiles and Presets… instead: it accepts .xmp presets, .xmp and .dcp profiles and .lcp lens profiles in one pass, including from inside a zip, and files each one where it belongs.

Profiles do not appear in the Presets panel. Look for them in the Profile Browser — the four-square icon next to the Profile dropdown at the top of the Basic panel.

Where Lightroom Classic keeps presets

Since Lightroom Classic 7.3 (April 2018), Develop presets are .xmp files stored in the settings folder that Classic shares with Adobe Camera Raw. That sharing is why a preset installed for Classic also shows up in Camera Raw and Bridge.

Both of those parent folders are hidden by default. On macOS, hold Option while opening the Finder Go menu to reveal Library. On Windows, type %appdata% into the address bar of File Explorer. Note the Roaming segment on Windows — several popular guides drop it, and the path will not exist without it.

You can drop .xmp files straight into that Settings folder, optionally inside a subfolder that becomes the group name. Restart Lightroom Classic afterwards; it reads the folder on launch, not continuously.

When presets do not appear after importing

• Restart Lightroom. Folder-drop installs are only picked up on launch.
• Check the Presets panel filters. Right-click the Presets header — there are options to hide partially compatible presets and to show Adobe's own groups. If your imports are hidden, un-hide them there.
• Look for Adobe's Premium and Style groups. Recent versions mix Adobe's supplied presets into the same panel, and a long list of theirs can bury a group of yours. Collapse the Adobe groups.
• Confirm the file is a preset, not a profile. A profile in the wrong folder silently does nothing. Presets contain crs: slider attributes; DCP profiles are binary.
• Check process version compatibility. A preset written against a much newer process version may be listed as partially compatible and hidden. The current process version is set in the Calibration panel.

Exporting a preset back out

Right-click any preset in the Develop module's Presets panel and choose Export… to write an .xmp you can send to someone else or copy to another machine. Right-click a whole group to export the group as a folder. This is also the easiest way to inspect what a preset actually does: .xmp is plain XML, so open the exported file in a text editor and read the slider values directly.

That transparency cuts both ways, and it is worth using. Before you install a bought preset pack, open one of the files. If every preset in the pack is the same three sliders with slightly different numbers, you have learned something useful for nine seconds of effort.

What a well-formed preset file looks like

<x:xmpmeta xmlns:x="adobe:ns:meta/">
 <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
    xmlns:crs="http://ns.adobe.com/camera-raw-settings/1.0/"
    crs:PresetType="Normal"
    crs:UUID="1F3C…"
    crs:SupportsAmount="True"
    crs:SupportsColor="True"
    crs:SupportsMonochrome="False"
    crs:Contrast2012="+18"
    crs:Highlights2012="-34">
   <crs:Name><rdf:Alt><rdf:li xml:lang="x-default">Cold Halation</rdf:li></rdf:Alt></crs:Name>
  </rdf:Description>
 </rdf:RDF>
</x:xmpmeta>

Note what is not there: no byte-order mark, no <?xpacket?> wrapper. Lightroom writes preset XMP as a bare x:xmpmeta document — sidecar XMP files are wrapped, presets are not — and the Supports* flags control whether the preset is offered for colour photos, monochrome conversions and partial amounts. Presets exported from PresetForge match this structure byte for byte, which is why they import without a conversion step.