Lightroom: Thumbnail Sizes

One of the big strength of Lightroom is its flexibility. There’s always more than one way of doing things in Lightroom. This flexibility is also one of the source of frustration with many users. Lightroom’s flexibility allows for the almost infinite customization of your own workflow.

One of my most often used step is to clear the whole desktop, use Lightroom’s Grid view (“g”) and pick, reject, grade with 1 star… Everything that looks “real bad” gets marked as rejected (“x”) in the first round. For my first round, I use the thumbnail in the maximum size to decide what’s in focus or not.

Usually, after the first round, I shrink the size of thumbnails so I can see more photographs and select my favorites.

To change the size of the thumbnails, most people use the slider at the bottom right right:

This doesn’t really work for me. Most of the times in the Grid View, I hide the toolbar (“t”) and all the panels (“Shift-Tab”). The thumbnail size slider is part of the hidden toolbar. Then I use the “-” to shrink the size of the thumbnails and the “=” to increase the size of the thumbnails. That’s the “-” and the “=” at the top right of the keyboard, next to the backspace.