If you bought or made presets before 2018, you have .lrtemplate files. And if you have opened Lightroom in the last few years — the cloud one, the phone one — you will have found that it simply does not accept them. There is no clear error: it just does not see them.

It happened to mine. I had three black and white presets and three colour ones that I have used at weddings for years, all in the old format. This is what I learned converting them, and why it is not as simple as it looks.

What changed in 2018

Adobe changed the preset format in Lightroom Classic 7.3. .lrtemplate stopped being the standard and .xmp took over — which is what Lightroom Classic, desktop Lightroom and the mobile app all read today.

Lightroom Classic still converts the old ones on import. The cloud version does not: if your library lives there, or you edit from your phone, your .lrtemplate files do not exist.

It is not a matter of renaming the extension

It is the first thing everyone tries, and it does not work. They are two different file formats inside: .lrtemplate is a Lua table, .xmp is XML. Renaming one does not turn it into the other — you end up with a file no version of Lightroom can read.

The trap almost nobody sees: the process version

This is the part that actually matters, and the reason an automatic conversion can change your look without telling you.

Besides its values, every preset stores the process version it was made with. The process version is how Lightroom interprets those numbers. The same exposure, contrast and curve values do not look the same under one process version as under another — Adobe changes how shadows, noise and highlights are rendered between them.

So if you convert a preset and the process version gets updated along the way, the new file holds the same numbers but produces a different photograph. And it is a hard difference to catch by eye: it does not look bad, it looks slightly unlike what you have been using for years.

My two packs have different process versions from each other, precisely because they were made at different times: 6.7 in the GOT Pack and 11.0 in the black and white ones. A blunt conversion would have levelled them and broken both.

How I did it: setting by setting, then counting them

I did not use the automatic conversion. I moved each preset by hand, setting by setting, keeping its original process version. And then I did the part I think you cannot skip: comparing all 528 values across the six presets, one by one, between the old file and the new one.

They all match. That is what lets me tell you the .xmp you download does exactly what the .lrtemplate I have used for years does — not something close to it.

The detail of the internal names

Something I found along the way that happens to a lot of people: the name Lightroom shows you is not the file name, it is a name stored inside the preset. And mine were dirty after years of saving and re-saving — one was literally called B&W Darks.lrtemplate Preset, with the extension baked into the name, and another one was called temporalalba.

When I moved them to .xmp I gave them the file name, which is the one I actually use. If you are going to convert yours, open them and look: you are very likely carrying names you never wanted in your panel.

Why I still include the .lrtemplate files

Because not everyone updates. Both packs I sell carry their three presets in both formats: the .xmp files for any Lightroom of today, and the original .lrtemplate files in case you work with a version older than 2018. It costs nothing to include them and it stops someone being unable to use what they paid for.

If you are going to convert yours

Three things, in order of importance. Check the process version before and after — it is the one thing that can change your look without you noticing. Check the internal names, because they almost certainly carry junk. And compare the values instead of trusting that the conversion went well: ten minutes of checking saves you finding out six months from now that your preset is no longer your preset.