Help › Getting Started with LrGeniusAI for Lightroom Classic

Getting Started

One way to get going, start to finish: install, download the models, analyze your first photos. Everything runs on your own computer — no account, no API key, no cloud.

You need:

  • Lightroom Classic 14 or newer
  • A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or newer) or a Windows PC
  • 16 GB of memory
  • About 10 GB of free disk space

Before you start: back up your catalog

LrGeniusAI writes its results into your Lightroom catalog — keywords, titles, captions, and its own fields such as species or culling results. That has two side effects you should know about before the first run, because neither can be undone afterwards:

  • The Edit Date of your photos changes. Lightroom counts every change a plug-in makes to a photo as an edit, so each photo LrGeniusAI processes gets the time of the run as its Edit Date — even on an Analyze & Index run that writes no titles, captions or keywords. Smart collections that filter on Edit Date will pick those photos up. Lightroom gives a plug-in no way to set the old date back, and putting old metadata back would itself count as another edit.
  • Your image files may change too. If Automatically write changes into XMP is turned on (Catalog Settings → Metadata), Lightroom writes the new keywords, titles and captions into XMP sidecar files, and directly into DNG, JPEG, TIFF and PSD files. A cloud or NAS sync tool then sees all of those files as changed and uploads them again.

So before you let LrGeniusAI loose on your catalog:

  1. Back up your catalog. Open Catalog Settings (Edit → Catalog Settings… on Windows, Lightroom Classic → Catalog Settings… on a Mac), set Back up catalog on the General tab to When Lightroom next exits, quit Lightroom and click Back Up in the dialog that appears.
  2. Check your XMP setting on the Metadata tab of the same window, and whether your photos sit in a folder that a cloud or NAS service syncs.
  3. Start small. Try LrGeniusAI on a handful of photos (step 3 below) and look at what changed before you run it over the whole catalog.

Restoring a catalog backup is the only way to get the old Edit Dates back — and it also undoes everything else you changed in the catalog since. A catalog backup does not include your image files, so it cannot undo what Lightroom wrote into them.

LrGeniusAI comes without any warranty, and AI results can be wrong. With a cloud AI provider, photo previews and metadata go to that provider. Read the Disclaimer before you start, and before you connect an AI agent.

1. Install

  1. Open the latest release and download the installer for your computer:
    • Mac: LrGeniusAI-macos-arm64-….pkg
    • Windows: LrGeniusAI-windows-x64-….exe
  2. Quit Lightroom Classic.
  3. Run the installer and click through it.
  4. Start Lightroom Classic.

That’s it — the installer puts the plugin into Lightroom and starts the LrGeniusAI server in the background.

If your computer warns about the installer

  • Mac (“cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer”): open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.
  • Windows (“Windows protected your PC”): click More info, then Run anyway.

2. Download the models

  1. In Lightroom, open File → Plug-in Manager… and select LrGeniusAI.
  2. Under Status, click Run Setup Wizard.
  3. On the Backend Server tab, read the Before you start box (the same advice as above) and check that Server Status says Running.
  4. Switch to the AI Models tab:
    1. Click Download AI Models (about 3.3 GB). These power search, species and face detection.
    2. Further down, in Local AI Model — MLX (Mac) or Local AI Model — llama.cpp (Windows), pick Gemma 4 E4B (recommended) and click Download (about 5–6 GB). This is the model that writes your keywords, titles and captions.
  5. Click OK.

The downloads keep running in the background — watch the progress bar in the top-left corner of Lightroom. Wait until both are finished before you go on.

3. Analyze your first photos

  1. In the Library, select a few photos (start with 10–20). Back up your catalog first if you have not — see Before you start.
  2. Open Library → Plug-in Extras → Analyze & Index Photos…
  3. Under AI Model, choose:
    • Mac: On this Mac · gemma-4-e4b-it-4bit
    • Windows: On this PC · gemma-4-E4B-it-Q4_K_M.gguf
  4. Leave everything else as it is and click Start.
  5. For each photo, a Review results window shows what the AI wrote. Click OK to save it to the photo.

The first photo takes a little longer while the model loads.

Freeing memory after a big run

Analysing a catalog loads the AI models into memory, and the backend keeps them there for 30 minutes after the last request — so on a machine that is already busy, Lightroom and everything else can feel the squeeze for a while afterwards.

To hand that memory back straight away, open File → Plug-in Manager…, select LrGeniusAI and click Unload AI Models under System Health. Nothing is lost: the models are not deleted and your index is untouched, and they load again on the next analysis or search, which takes a few seconds.

4. Search your photos

  1. Open Library → Plug-in Extras → Advanced Search…
  2. Describe what you are looking for, e.g. dog on the beach or red car in front of a house.
  3. Click Search.

The matches appear as a new collection under Search Results in the Collections panel.

Done

Now run Analyze & Index Photos over the rest of your catalog.

When you want to explore more, the Plugin Guide lists every feature. Stuck? See Troubleshooting.

Edit this page on GitHub