What you need
- A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later), running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Intel Macs are not supported.
- Lightroom Classic, with the catalog you edit in. This is the desktop app, not the cloud-based Lightroom app. The Expedit plugin needs Lightroom Classic 10 or later, and the AI Denoise tool needs Lightroom Classic 12.3 or later, the first version with AI Denoise.
- Your own edited RAW photos. Expedit learns from the RAW files you've already edited, from any camera brand, including DNG. It starts to work well from around 500 edited RAW photos and hits its stride from about 2,500, whether they span two years or ten. JPEGs aren't used for learning, so a library that is mostly JPEG won't give it enough to go on.
- Your original files where Lightroom expects them. Expedit looks at the photos themselves, not just their settings, so the drives that hold your originals need to be connected while it trains.
- An internet connection, now and then. You need one to sign in, and for a quick license check about once a week. Training and editing run entirely on your Mac, and Expedit keeps working offline for about a month between checks.
Setting up
Setting up takes a few minutes, and you only do it once. Open Expedit, click its icon in the menu bar at the top right of your screen, and choose . The Setup page walks you through each step.
- Connect your Lightroom catalog. Expedit looks for your catalogs and lists the ones it finds. Pick the one you edit in, or click Browse to find it yourself. Expedit only ever reads your catalog. It never writes to it.
- Install the Lightroom plugin. Click Install Lightroom Plugin. If Lightroom is open, quit it and open it again, because Lightroom only loads plugins when it starts. If the plugin shows as disabled in Lightroom's , select Expedit there and click Enable. You can also install the plugin from the menu bar at any time.
- Check your photo files. Expedit checks that it can reach the original files for your photos. If a drive is disconnected, plug it in and click Refresh. If you've moved a folder since Lightroom last saw it, use Remap to point Expedit at its new location.
- Train your first model. Click Continue to Training and follow Training your model below. The first training takes a while on a big catalog, and you can keep using your Mac and Lightroom while it runs.
Where everything lives
Expedit has two halves, and you'll spend almost all of your time in the second one.
A small app in your Mac's menu bar, with a dashboard window. This is where you set things up, train your model, and see how it's doing. Once it's trained, you rarely need to open it.
Every editing tool runs from Lightroom's own menu, so you never have to leave Lightroom to use them. Select some photos, then choose a command from . The same commands are in , which also works from the Develop module.
In the Plug-in Extras menu you'll find the three everyday commands first, then the Batch tools:
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| Edits the selected photos in your style. | |
| Carries the corrections you made to a few photos across the rest of the shoot. | |
| Sorts a fresh import into picks, photos to review, and culls. | |
| Runs Lightroom's AI Denoise on a batch at the strength you set per ISO. | |
| Puts one camera profile on every selected photo without touching your sliders. | |
| Makes a copy of each photo with the faces you choose pixelated. |
The Expedit app needs to be running for most of these commands. If Lightroom says it can't reach Expedit, open the app from your Applications folder and try again.
The Setup page
Besides the first-time checklist, the Setup page is where you come back to if something about your files or catalog changes.
- Catalog. The catalog Expedit is connected to. If you switch to another catalog in Lightroom, connect Expedit to it here as well. Lightroom and Expedit have to be looking at the same catalog, and Expedit will tell you if they aren't.
- Photo files. How many of your original files Expedit can reach, folder by folder. Folders on a disconnected drive are listed under Needs attention. You can still train while some are offline; those photos are simply skipped until the drive is back. Use Remap for a folder that has moved and Clear Remap to undo it.
Lightroom plugin settings
Two choices here change how Apply User Predictions behaves, so you don't have to answer the same question every time.
- When applying predictions to photos that already have Lightroom edits
- Ask every time shows a question when some photos in the batch already have edits. Always include them replaces the existing edits without asking (their settings are backed up first). Always skip them leaves photos with existing edits alone.
- Setting your usual camera profile when applying predictions
- As I left it last time starts ticked and then remembers what you did. Always ticked sets your usual profile with every apply unless you untick it. Always unticked only changes the profile when you tick the box yourself.
Training your model
Training is how Expedit learns your style. It reads the develop settings on the photos you've edited, looks at each photo itself, and learns what you tend to do when a photo looks a certain way. Everything happens on your Mac.
Choosing which photos to learn from
On the Training page, the Which photos to learn from card decides what goes into your model. Expedit suggests settings that suit your catalog; click Use recommended to accept them, or set your own:
- Photo folders. Leave out folders that aren't in your usual style, such as client work edited to someone else's brief.
- Camera. Choose which cameras to include. The count next to each shows how many edited photos it has.
- Minimum rating. Learn only from photos you rated at least this many stars. Useful if you only polish your best shots.
- Limit to a date range. If your style has changed over the years, train on just your recent edits and the model follows how you edit now, rather than averaging everything you've ever done.
Photos you've only rated or keyworded, without editing them, are left out automatically, so they can't teach the model to change nothing.
Starting a training run
Give the model a name if you like, then start it. The training summary on the right shows how many of your files are reachable before you begin. If your Mac is on battery, Expedit asks you to plug in first, or to confirm you'll keep it awake.
While it trains you'll see a progress bar and an estimate of the time left. You can keep using Lightroom. You can Pause, Resume or Cancel at any point. If a drive disconnects mid-run, training pauses. Reconnect it and click Resume, or choose Keep training to carry on without those photos.
What to expect from your model
When training finishes, Expedit tells you plainly how well it can predict each kind of edit for you, rated Excellent, Strong or Learning. Edits rated Learning are the ones where you'll still make small corrections by hand at first. Expedit picks those corrections up and gets better at them over time.
You'll also see each setting sorted into one of three groups:
- Predicted per photo
- Settings that change with each photo's light and content, which your model predicts individually.
- Guided by your edits
- Settings that follow the shoot more than the single photo. Your corrections guide these, which is what Sync Corrections is for.
- Starts from your typical value
- Settings you tend to keep the same, which start from the value you usually use.
You can open this again any time from your model on the Training page, under What to expect.
Editing Overview
The Editing Overview page has two tabs.
- Prediction Performance
- How well your model is doing on your real photos. Once you've applied predictions in Lightroom, Expedit measures how many predicted settings you kept, how many photos you left untouched, fine-tuned, or heavily reworked, and which settings you correct most often. Crops, masks and retouching never count against it. A Time saved card adds it up: the hours Expedit saved you, month by month, next to how many photos it edited, how many needed no changes, and how much of the slider work it did compared with your own fixes. It only counts settings Expedit set that you kept, and a setting with the same value across a folder counts once, as if you'd synced it. When Expedit has learned something from your corrections, an Improvement ready card appears here with an Apply improvement button.
- Editing Overview
- A look at your own editing habits: how many photos you've edited, your average adjustment on every slider (your signature look), when you edit, the cameras, lenses and focal lengths you shoot with, and the tools you use most.
Account
The Account page is where you sign in to Expedit. Enter the email you bought it with, click Email Me a Sign-In Code, and type in the 6-digit code we send you. The code works for 15 minutes; if it runs out, click Resend Code.
Your license covers one Mac at a time. Signing in on another Mac moves it there and signs the old one out, so you can switch Macs without asking us. Sign Out of This Mac is only needed if you're giving the Mac away.
Business licenses
A Business license is for a team. It is one yearly subscription with a number of seats, and each seat is one person using Expedit on one Mac at a time. Working alone, even as a business? The Individual license is the one for you.
Setting up your team
- Open the team page, enter the email you bought with, and type in the 6-digit code we send you.
- Add each person's work email. Everyone you add gets a seat, up to the number you bought.
- Each person downloads Expedit and signs in from the Account page with that same work email. Each person trains their own model on their own Mac, from their own edits.
What the team page shows
The team page lists everyone on the team, with the name of the Mac they signed in on and when it was last active. It also shows how many seats are used and when the subscription renews, and you can set your company name there.
Someone marked No seat was added after your seats ran out. Add seats or remove someone and they are covered. To add or remove seats, send us a seat change request.
Moving a seat, or removing someone
When someone leaves, remove them on the team page and add the new person in their place. The seat moves to them. A removed person's Mac is signed out at its next license check, within about a week, or up to a month if that Mac is offline.
Billing
You get one invoice with your company name and VAT ID. The subscription renews every year. Cancel any time and it runs to the end of the paid year. For ten or more seats, ask us for a price.
Apply User Predictions
This is the heart of Expedit. It predicts develop settings for every photo you point it at, in your style, and applies them as an ordinary Lightroom edit. What you get isn't a preset: each photo gets its own settings, based on its light, its content and the camera it came from. You fine-tune from there instead of starting from zero.
The Apply dialog
- Apply to
- Which photos to edit: your Selected photos, the whole Current view (the folder or collection you're in), or another folder or collection picked with Browse….
- Use what Expedit learned from your recent editing
- Appears when Expedit has a newer version of your model that learned from your latest corrections but that you haven't adopted yet. Tick it to try that version on this batch.
- Include your recent corrections
- If you've been correcting the same settings after Expedit's edits in this shoot, they're listed here. Ticked ones are added on top of the predictions, so the rest of the shoot starts closer to where you were heading.
- Edit these panels
- The Develop panels Expedit is allowed to change, such as Tone, White Balance, Presence and HSL. Untick a panel to leave it exactly as it is.
- Camera profile
- Tick Set the profile to to put your usual camera profile on the photos as well. Only the profile changes, and photos that already have it are left alone.
- Options
- Skip photos Expedit has already applied to and Skip photos with existing edits let you run it on a folder again without redoing work. Both start unticked.
Click Apply. A progress bar shows how far it has got, and you can cancel at any point.
Photos that already have edits
If some photos in the batch already have edits, Expedit asks before replacing them: Skip Edited Photos or Include Them. Tick Remember this choice and it won't ask again; you can change your answer later on the Setup page.
Sync Corrections
No software can know the mood you wanted from a particular day. Sync Corrections lets you show it. Correct a few photos from a shoot, and Expedit carries the same direction across the rest.
How to use it
- Apply predictions to a shoot, as usual.
- Correct two or three photos by hand. Warm them up, lift the shadows, whatever the shoot needs.
- Select the whole shoot, including the photos you corrected, and run Sync Corrections.
Expedit compares each photo with what it originally predicted. The photos you changed show it what you want, and the photos you haven't touched receive that change. Photos Expedit never predicted are left alone, and it tells you how many there were.
Checking what carries across
Before anything changes, you see a list of every adjustment that will carry across, grouped by Develop panel, and you can untick any of them. Some may be marked in colour:
- Red: you changed this on only a few of your corrected photos (under 25%). It's probably a one-off decision for those photos rather than something the whole shoot needs.
- Amber: you changed it on some of your corrected photos but not most (25 to 80%). Check that you want it on every photo.
- No colour: you changed it on most of your corrected photos. It's very likely part of the look you're after.
Buttons such as Untick red and Untick all flagged clear the flagged ones in one go.
Sync Forward
If your selection has a gap in it, for example the first few photos of a sunset and then a later stretch of the same evening, Expedit asks how to treat it. Sync Forward uses your corrections from the first group and applies them to every later group. Sync as One Batch treats the whole selection as one shoot. The box Also sync to the photos you've already corrected, ticked to start with, decides whether photos you've corrected by hand also get the change on top of their own edits.
Recent Syncs
Every sync is remembered. Choose Recent Syncs… to apply one you made earlier to a new selection, which is handy when a later shoot needs the same treatment. If nothing in your selection has been corrected, Recent Syncs opens on its own.
Cull Selection
Cull Selection does the first sort of a fresh import for you. It groups bursts and near-identical frames into takes, brings the sharpest frame of each take forward, and ranks the takes by what you usually keep. It learns that from the photos you've rated highly or exported in the past, so there's nothing to set up.
What you get
Select the import, run Cull Selection, and a summary shows how the photos were sorted into three groups:
- Picks
- The strongest frame of each take. Look at these first.
- Review
- Worth a second look: alternates and photos it isn't sure about.
- Culled
- Near-duplicates, weaker frames and technical misses.
Under Mark with, choose how the groups are marked in Lightroom:
- Stars: picks get 5 stars, review gets 3, culls get none.
- Flags: picks are flagged, culls are rejected, review is left unflagged.
Photos you've already rated, flagged or colour labelled are left exactly as they are by default. They still help the cull see which shots you've kept. You can choose to include them instead.
Batch: Apply AI Denoise
Runs Lightroom's own AI Denoise across a batch, unattended, at a strength that depends on each photo's ISO. Start it before dinner and the grainy night shots are clean when you come back.
Setting the strength
The dialog lists every ISO in your selection, with how many photos were shot at each one, and a strength from 0 to 100 next to it. Expedit fills these in from a sensible starting curve the first time. Change any of them, and Expedit remembers your number for that ISO from then on. A strength of 0 leaves those photos alone.
Running it
- Before it starts, you see how many photos will be denoised and roughly how long it will take.
- AI Denoise is heavy work, so Expedit runs it in small rounds with a short pause between them, up to 100 photos per run. If your selection is bigger, run it again and it carries on with the next ones.
- The progress bar shows how many are done and about how long is left. You can cancel at any point.
- Photos that already have AI Denoise are skipped by default. You can choose to update their strength instead, which is quick because it doesn't run the full denoise again.
Batch: Apply Camera Profile
Puts one camera profile, such as Adobe Landscape or Adobe Color, on every selected RAW or DNG photo. Only the profile changes. Every slider stays exactly where it was.
Pick the profile from the list. The first choice is Your usual: the profile you've chosen for most of each camera's photos over the past year, with a note such as Adobe Landscape on 84% of your ILCE-7M3 photos this past year. If you shoot with more than one camera, each one gets its own usual profile. The dialog tells you how many photos will change, how many already have that profile, and how many can't take it because it was made for a different camera.
Batch: Censor Faces
Makes a copy of each photo with the faces you choose pixelated, ready to post or share. The copy is still a RAW file, so it edits exactly like the original, and your original isn't changed.
How to use it
- Select the photos and run Batch: Censor Faces. Expedit looks through them for faces.
- A window shows every face it found, grouped by person. Each person has a checkbox that ticks or unticks all of their faces at once, and each face has its own checkbox too. Faces Expedit only saw once are grouped under Other faces. Everything starts ticked.
- Untick anyone you want to leave as they are, such as yourself or your travel partner, then click Censor.
What you get
- A new file next to each original, named like DSC01234-Censored.dng, stacked with the original in Lightroom so the two stay together.
- The faces are pixelated in the RAW data itself, not painted on top, so the copy has the same edit as the original and the same room to adjust it.
- Previews stored inside the file are cleaned too, and the names you've given people in Lightroom aren't carried into the copy.
- Censored copies are never used to train your model, so the same edit is never counted twice.
How your model improves
Your model is the most valuable thing Expedit builds, so it's treated carefully. It keeps learning from your editing in the background, but a new version never replaces your current one without asking you first.
It follows your rhythm
An update gets prepared when there's something new to learn: once you've hand-edited a good batch of photos your model has never seen, or once you're correcting its predictions noticeably more than usual. A heavy editing season brings updates sooner, and a quiet one leaves your model alone. The menu bar shows how close the next one is, for example Update in: 12 more edited photos.
It trains when you're not looking
A due update waits for a quiet moment. It holds off while you're editing or while your Mac is low on battery, then trains in the background without taking over the machine.
It has to pass a test
Before you hear about it, the new version has to beat your current model on photos you edited by hand. If it doesn't win, nothing changes. If it only wins on some adjustments, only those are offered to you.
You get the final say
When an update wins, a dot appears on the menu bar icon and Model Update Ready… appears in the menu. The window that opens, A model update is ready, shows the measured improvement adjustment by adjustment, with two buttons:
- Apply Update switches to the new version. Your current model is saved first.
- Not Now parks it quietly. The dot stays, nothing nags you, and if a better update comes along later it simply takes the parked one's place.
Every update is reversible
After you apply an update, Revert Last Update appears in the menu bar. One click puts your previous model back exactly as it was.
If your style has moved on a lot, you can also train a fresh model on just your recent edits from the Training page.
Undo and safety
- Everything is undoable. Predictions, synced corrections, profiles and denoise all land as ordinary Lightroom history steps. Step back through the History panel or press Command-Z.
- Your catalog is read-only to Expedit. Expedit reads your catalog to learn, but every change to your photos is made through Lightroom itself.
- Your own edits are respected. In a normal sync, the photos you corrected are left as they are, and Apply asks before replacing existing edits.
- Predictions stay in your range. Each setting stays within the range you actually use, so a prediction never lands somewhere you'd never go.
- Nothing is deleted. Cull Selection only marks photos, and Censor Faces always makes a new file instead of changing the original.
Privacy
Your photos never leave your Mac
Many AI editing services upload your photos to their servers to learn your style and edit them. Expedit doesn't. Training your model, predicting edits, culling, denoising and hiding faces all happen on your Mac. No photo, preview, catalog or edit is ever sent to us, and the model Expedit learns from your editing is never uploaded. It works offline.
Only a few small things use the internet, and none of them contain your photos:
- License checks: about once a week. If one is missed, Expedit keeps working offline for about a month.
- Updates: Expedit checks for new versions and downloads them when available.
- Error reports: if you leave them on, a small report about the app when something breaks: app logs and settings, never your photos or catalog.
- Usage counts: once a day, a few running totals, such as how many photos were predicted. No file names or settings. Same on/off switch as error reports, on the Setup page.
For the full details, see our privacy policy.
Troubleshooting
- The Expedit commands aren't in Plug-in Extras.
- Choose Install Lightroom Plugin… in the Expedit menu bar, then quit and reopen Lightroom. If they're still missing, open , select Expedit and make sure it's enabled.
- Lightroom says Expedit was updated but it's still running the old plugin.
- Expedit updated its plugin, but Lightroom keeps using the one it loaded at startup. Restart Lightroom, or reload Expedit in the Plug-in Manager. Most updates don't touch the plugin, so you won't see this often.
- Lightroom says it can't reach Expedit.
- The Expedit app isn't running. Open it from your Applications folder and try again. Turning on Start on Login in the menu bar keeps it ready.
- It says the catalog doesn't match.
- Lightroom has a different catalog open from the one Expedit is connected to. Open the right catalog in Lightroom, or connect Expedit to this one on the Setup page.
- Some photos were skipped because their files couldn't be found.
- Those originals are on a drive that isn't connected, or in a folder that has moved. Connect the drive, or use Remap on the Setup page, then run the command again.
- The predictions aren't quite right for a shoot.
- That's normal for things that depend on the mood of the day. Correct two or three photos and run Sync Corrections. Expedit learns from those corrections over time, too.
- I still need help.
- Email [email protected]. If we ask for diagnostics, choose Send Diagnostics… in the menu bar. It sends logs and settings, never your photos.