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User Guide

Lightroom AI Bridge lets Claude edit your photos in a real, running Adobe Lightroom Classic. This guide takes you from nothing installed to your first finished edit, in order. The other pages cover editing and culling workflows, how the knowledge base learns your taste, and troubleshooting.

What Lightroom AI Bridge does

It is a remote control for Lightroom Classic's Develop module that an AI agent can operate while looking at your photo. The agent renders the photo through Lightroom's own pipeline, studies the result, moves the real sliders, renders again, and compares: look, edit, look. Every change is a normal non-destructive Develop step, recorded in your History panel as "Claude: ...", in your own catalog.

It is not an image generator, an upscaler, or a filter pack. It never rewrites your RAW files, and Lightroom's generative tools are only used when you ask for them.

What it does well:

  • Take one photo from flat RAW to finished, with reasoning you can read.
  • Cull and rate a large shoot down to the keepers.
  • Apply a consistent look across a set, verified photo by photo.
  • Measure what your eye argues about: tilt, clipping, which area wins attention.

Requirements

  • A Mac. The bridge uses macOS paths and a local Unix socket; Windows and Linux are untested.
  • Adobe Lightroom Classic 15.3 or later. Lightroom (the cloud version) has no plug-in support, so it must be Classic.
  • Python 3, which is already on macOS. Check with python3 --version.
  • An AI agent: Claude Code, or any app that supports MCP. You can also use the command line on its own.
  • Optional: Pillow (pip3 install --user Pillow), only for the contact-sheet culling helpers.

Install

Get the files

With git:

git clone https://github.com/aslanoov/lightroom-ai-bridge.git ~/lightroom-ai-bridge

Without git: download the source zip from the latest release, unzip it, and rename the folder to lightroom-ai-bridge in your home folder. That is the location the skills look for first; anywhere else works too, as long as you tell them (see below).

Add the plug-in to Lightroom

  1. Open Lightroom Classic.
  2. Choose File > Plug-in Manager.
  3. Click Add, select the ClaudeBridge.lrplugin folder inside lightroom-ai-bridge, then click Add Plug-in.
  4. The panel should read "This plug-in is enabled and running". Click Done.

Inside Lightroom the plug-in appears as Claude Bridge. That is this project's plug-in, and the menus in this guide use that name.

From now on it starts with Lightroom, and a brief "Claude Bridge running" badge appears in the top-left corner at launch. It listens on your Mac only (127.0.0.1), so nothing is exposed to your network.

Check the connection

Select a photo in Lightroom, then in Terminal:

cd ~/lightroom-ai-bridge
./lrc ping

A healthy reply names the plug-in, your Lightroom version, the current module, and the photo that is selected. If it says "Lightroom not reachable", see Troubleshooting.

The first command quietly starts a small background helper that keeps the connection open, so later commands are instant.

Connect your AI agent

cd ~/lightroom-ai-bridge
./skills/install.sh

This installs two skills. Type /lightroom-bridge for everyday editing and culling, or /lightroom-bridge-pro for the pro edit: one photo taken from RAW to finished with no questions asked. You can also just describe what you want, such as "darken the sky on this shot", and the right skill starts on its own.

If you put the files somewhere other than ~/lightroom-ai-bridge, tell the skills where:

echo 'export LIGHTROOM_BRIDGE_HOME="$HOME/path/to/lightroom-ai-bridge"' >> ~/.zshrc

Any MCP client

The same operations are available as 46 MCP tools, with before and after previews shown as images in the chat. In Claude Desktop, open Settings > Developer > Edit Config and add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lightroom": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--directory", "/Users/you/lightroom-ai-bridge", "lightroom-bridge"]
    }
  }
}

Replace /Users/you with your home folder. This needs uv, which fetches everything else by itself. Then ask the client to "ping Lightroom".

The command line on its own

Every action is a ./lrc command, for example ./lrc set Exposure=0.3 Shadows=20. The command reference lists them all.

Your first edit

  1. In Lightroom, select one photo and open it in Develop.
  2. In Claude Code, write: "Edit this shot. Open up the shadows, keep the sky from blowing out, and show me before and after."

You will see the agent confirm the connection, render a before image and study it, read the current slider values, make a few adjustments, render again, compare, and report what it changed and why. Watch the History panel on the left: each step appears as "Claude: ...", and clicking any earlier step takes the photo back there.

Then try the pro edit on a single photo by typing /lightroom-bridge-pro. It writes a short brief on what the photo needs, then works through geometry, tone, color, cleanup, masks, the grade, and detail, and finishes with a strict quality check. Add a sentence to steer it, such as "keep it moody, do not lift the shadows".

How to ask for an edit

  • Describe the problem, not the slider. "The eye goes to the bright building on the left" gets a better edit than "set Highlights to -40", because the agent can check the fix in the render.
  • Use intent words. Moody, clean, warm, filmic, natural. The agent turns them into concrete decisions and tells you which ones it made.
  • Correct it plainly. "Too warm", "the crop was better before", "I like crushed blacks here". Corrections are what the knowledge base learns from, so the next session starts closer to your taste.
  • Name the destination. Print, a client gallery, a platform with its own rules. The agent respects constraints it knows about.

The safety net

  • Your RAW files are never modified. Develop settings live in your catalog.
  • Every action is a History step labeled "Claude: ...", and you can click back to any of them.
  • Before a multi-step edit the agent takes a snapshot, and restoring it brings back the sliders and masks exactly. The pro edit does this automatically.
  • Nothing is exported unless you ask, and ratings, flags and labels are only touched when the job is about them.

Updates

New versions are listed on the releases page. To update, run git pull in ~/lightroom-ai-bridge, or download the new zip and replace the folder (keep your kb folder). When the release notes say the plug-in changed, open File > Plug-in Manager, select Claude Bridge, and click Reload Plug-in in the Plug-in Author Tools section, or restart Lightroom.

Privacy

The bridge talks only to Lightroom on your own Mac and sends nothing to Speranda or anyone else. Your AI agent is a separate service: the previews and photo details it reads are sent to its provider, just like an image you paste into a chat. The privacy policy has the details.

Uninstall

  1. In Lightroom, open File > Plug-in Manager, select Claude Bridge, and click Remove.
  2. In Terminal, run ~/lightroom-ai-bridge/lrc daemon stop, then rm -rf ~/.claude-lrc-bridge.
  3. Remove the skills: rm ~/.claude/skills/lightroom-bridge ~/.claude/skills/lightroom-bridge-pro.
  4. Delete the lightroom-ai-bridge folder. Keep a copy of its kb folder if you might come back: it holds everything the agent learned about your taste.

Your photos and catalog are unaffected, and past edits stay in History.

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