Joe HoughtonAssistant Professor of Project Management, UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School · “Husband, dad, educator, best-selling author of 17 books, facilitator, speaker, consultant, podcaster, Board chair, photographer - wearer of many hats! “People gardener

Lightroom Bites 003 - Showing & hiding your panels using shortcuts

5 Apr 2021 · 2 min

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1:58

In this short tutorial, Lightroom expert Joe Houghton walks viewers through a set of keyboard shortcuts that let users quickly hide or reveal Lightroom’s interface panels. He demonstrates that the function keys F5 (top panel), F6 (bottom panel), F7 (left panel), and F8 (right panel) toggle the corresponding panels in both the Library and Develop modules, noting that on macOS the Function key must be held while pressing the F‑key. He also shows the universal shortcut Shift + Tab, which collapses all panels at once or restores them with a second press. The video emphasizes how these shortcuts streamline workflow, especially when rating images or needing a larger viewing area.

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Hi, I'm Joe Houghton, and this is Lightroom Bites number 3. I'm going to show you some really useful shortcut keys today that you can use in any of the modules to hide and show the different panels in Lightroom. So here we are in the Grid View in Lightroom, and as normal, we've got the left-hand panel open. But if for some reason you want to close that left-hand panel, for instance, perhaps to see more images as you go through them to rate them perhaps, then the shortcut key for doing that is F7. Now on a Windows machine, you just press the F number on the keyboard on the very top row of your keyboard. On a Mac, you need to hold the Function key down while you do this. So on a Mac it's Function and F7, and on a Windows keyboard it's F7. To shut the top panel down is F5 or Function F5, and you can see there we, we hide and show where it says Library, Develop, Map, etc. F6 is the bottom panel. F7, the left-hand panel. F8, the right-hand panel. And this works just as well in Develop as it does in Library. Another useful shortcut key to hide and show all the tabs at once is Shift+Tab. So Shift+Tab closes any tabs that are open, and if you've got them all closed like this, Shift+Tab again and they'll all be open. So that's a very quick way to shut or open all the tabs at once, and that's our Lightroom Bite for today.