The Best Lightroom Classic Plugins for 2026

By David · Updated October 4, 2026 · 17 min read

Almost every list of the best Lightroom plugins is really a list of editing plugins. Topaz for noise, the Nik Collection for finishing, Luminar for skies. Those are good tools and they are all covered below, with current prices. But editing is one job out of several, and it was never the part of Lightroom Classic that ate my evenings.

The part that ate my evenings was everything around the editing. Digging through 40,000 photos to find the one I half-remembered. Tagging the same faces by hand for the hundredth time. Exporting a folder, then re-uploading it to Google Photos by hand. Building a client gallery in a website builder that knew nothing about my catalog.

I build Lightroom Classic plugins for a living, so I am biased and I will say that up front: the Lightroom Tools plugins in this list are mine. Most of the list is not, and where someone else's tool is the better buy I say so. It is organized by the job you are trying to do, because that is how you actually shop for a plugin. Every third-party price below was checked on the developer's own site on October 4, 2026.

Smart Search

Find photos by description

Face Tagger

Auto-tag people

Google Photos

Publish and back up

Google Drive

Full-res cloud backup

Instagram Grid Planner

Sequence a feed by color

Keptfolio

Publish a portfolio site

The best Lightroom Classic plugins at a glance

Three rules kept this list honest. Every plugin has to run in Lightroom Classic, not the cloud-based Lightroom or the mobile app (there is more on that split in the FAQ). Each one has to solve a job Lightroom genuinely cannot do on its own, rather than duplicating a built-in. And it has to be sold and updated today - a few plugins that still appear on most roundups did not make it, and I explain why near the end. Where something is a subscription, the table says so, because paying every month for a utility you open twice a week adds up fast.

Best for finding a photo you cannot name: Smart Search

Lightroom's search box only matches text you already typed. Filenames, keywords, captions, metadata. If you never keyworded "red door" or "foggy harbor," searching for those words returns an empty grid, even when the photos are sitting right there.

Smart Search changes what the word search means. It runs a CLIP model across your catalog on your own machine, so you can type "kid blowing out birthday candles" or "snow on pine branches" and it surfaces the matching frames with zero keywords attached. When you like the results, it can write them back as Lightroom keywords, so your normal search gets smarter over time. It costs $39 one-time and the model runs locally, so your library never leaves your computer. I wrote a longer walkthrough on finding photos by description if you want to see it in action.

The alternative: Excire Search 2026 is the well-known name here. It does more than search - automatic keywords, face recognition, duplicate detection and AI culling, all in one Lightroom Classic plugin - and it costs more: $229 one-time at Excire's own checkout, with a free trial first. It needs Lightroom Classic 14 or newer. If you want the whole organization suite and do not mind the price, Excire is the heavier tool. If you mostly want to type what is in a photo and have Lightroom find it without uploading anything, Smart Search is the focused, cheaper option. I compared the two, and the other options, in Excire Search alternatives.

Best for tagging people: Face Tagger

Lightroom has People View built in. It works fine until your library gets big, and then it starts guessing wrong with real confidence. The reasons are baked into how old the engine is, and I dug into them, and into what the paid alternatives actually cost, in a separate post on face recognition for Lightroom Classic.

Face Tagger replaces that engine with InsightFace ArcFace embeddings, which stay accurate across tens of thousands of photos because they model each person as a numerical fingerprint instead of a fuzzy cluster of look-alikes. You train it on a handful of photos per person, scan in batches, and it writes the results as ordinary Lightroom keywords and collections, so the tags live in your catalog rather than locked inside a plugin. It is $39 one-time and, like Smart Search, the recognition happens on your machine with nothing uploaded.

The alternative: stay with People View. On a library of a few thousand photos of the same handful of people, the built-in is genuinely fine and free. The plugin earns its price at the scale where you stop trusting the built-in.

Best for culling a shoot away from your desk: Thumbs

Culling is the slowest part of most shoots, and in Lightroom Classic it normally happens at the desk, one frame at a time, after you have already spent the day shooting.

Thumbs is a free Lightroom Classic plugin plus an iPhone app. You send a shoot from Lightroom Classic to your phone, swipe through it on the couch or on a train, and every pick, reject and star lands back on the right photo in your catalog. Small previews go out, only flags and stars come back, and nothing else in your catalog changes. It is free for culls of up to 100 photos; full shoots of up to 5,000 cost $29/year or $5/month. It needs Lightroom Classic on a Mac and an iPhone on iOS 17 or newer.

The alternative: if you already sync collections to Adobe's cloud, flag in the Lightroom mobile app and let those flags come back to Classic - it is included with your Lightroom plan and it works. For AI-assisted culling inside Lightroom Classic itself, Excire Search (above) and Neurapix (below) both check things like sharp eyes and focus for you. I wrote up whether culling on your phone is worth it separately.

Best for publishing to the cloud: Google Photos and Google Drive

Lightroom can export a folder of JPEGs. What it cannot do on its own is keep a cloud album in sync. Export, upload, edit one photo, and now your local copy and your shared album disagree. You are back to dragging files into a browser.

Lightroom's Publish Services solve that, and two of my plugins plug into them. The Google Photos plugin pushes selected photos into a Google Photos album and, when you re-edit and re-publish, updates the cloud copy in place. It talks to the official Google Photos API, which is the only sanctioned way to do this since the older sync apps were retired. I compared it with every other route from Lightroom Classic into Google Photos in the best Lightroom Classic plugin for Google Photos. The Google Drive plugin does the same for Drive, which is handy when you want full-resolution files as an off-site backup rather than the compressed copies a photo service keeps. Both are $19 one-time. If Publish Services are new to you, I broke down how publish services work separately.

The alternative: Jeffrey Friedl's export plugins have covered Flickr, SmugMug, Zenfolio and friends for well over a decade. They are donationware: free to use, with some features reduced after six weeks until you register, which costs as little as one cent. One honest caveat: updates have slowed (the Flickr exporter's latest version is from October 2024), so check a plugin's page against your Lightroom Classic version before you rely on it. If your cloud of choice is one of those rather than Google's, start there and pay him what it is worth to you.

Best for planning an Instagram feed: Instagram Grid Planner

When you post to Instagram, photos land in a three-wide grid, and a strong single image can still look wrong next to its neighbors. Most photographers plan that grid by hand in a separate app, working from exported JPEGs that are already one step removed from the catalog.

Instagram Grid Planner sequences your selected photos into a feed grid by color flow, so the running three-wide layout reads as deliberate instead of random. It groups carousels, previews at the 3:4 ratio Instagram actually uses, and lets you arrange the order inside Lightroom, where your edited photos already live. Then you export in that sequence. It is $29 one-time. It is a narrow tool, but if you care about how your feed reads as a whole, nothing in Lightroom does this.

Best for a client-ready portfolio site: Keptfolio

This is the job that usually leaves Lightroom entirely. You finish a shoot, export, then open a website builder or a gallery service and rebuild the selection by hand. Every re-edit means doing it again.

Keptfolio makes the portfolio a Publish Service like any other. You publish a collection and it becomes a designed, hosted page on your own site, with the hosting included. It handles three kinds of gallery: a public portfolio, a share-for-review link where clients star and comment on picks, and a download gallery that delivers full-resolution files with automatic expiry. Re-edit a photo in Lightroom, re-publish, and the live site updates.

It is a subscription - $69/year or $7/month, with a 14-day free trial - because it includes the hosting rather than being a plugin you install and forget. One flat plan, no feature tiers.

The alternative: if what you need is client proofing and delivery rather than a portfolio, Evlaa is a Lightroom plugin built around exactly that. Clients pick photos in a private gallery, their selections sync back to Lightroom, and you can deliver full-resolution files and sell prints from the same gallery. Its free plan allows two galleries at a time; paid plans start at $9/month billed yearly. I covered that workflow in client proofing in Lightroom Classic.

Best for juggling develop looks: Look Slots

Lightroom gives you exactly one develop clipboard. Copy settings from one photo, and whatever you had before is gone. If you are cutting between two or three looks across a shoot, you end up making presets you will never use again just to park a setting somewhere.

Look Slots gives you nine clipboards instead of one. Copy a look into slot 3, another into slot 7, and paste either one without losing the other. It adds a per-mask copy dialog for when you only want part of an edit, and it can re-segment AI masks on the target photo instead of pasting a mask shaped for someone else's face. It is $29 one-time and pure Lua, so it runs on Mac and Windows alike.

Best for collages and album spreads: Collage Studio

Lightroom Classic can make a collage in the Print module, but you draw every cell by hand and drop the photos in one at a time, page after page.

Collage Studio starts from the photos you already selected and lays out every page for you, with faces kept whole. It makes print collages, album spreads and Instagram posts, and saves the finished files back into your catalog, rendered from your edits. For every way to do it, free ones included, see how to make a collage in Lightroom Classic.

The best Lightroom plugins for editing

Since most people arriving at a list of the best Lightroom plugins came for editing, here is that half of the category properly rather than as an afterthought. None of these are mine, and every one of them works from inside Lightroom Classic, either as a plugin or through Photo > Edit In.

• Topaz Photo - noise reduction, sharpening and upscaling on high-ISO frames, where it still genuinely beats Lightroom's own denoise on the hardest files. The one editing plugin I reach for most. This is the old Topaz Photo AI under a new name, and since September 2025 it is subscription-only, from $199/year.
• Nik Collection 9 - film-style finishing and control-point adjustments from DxO. Silver Efex for black and white remains the reason people keep buying the suite. $179.99 one-time.
• DxO PureRAW 6 - raw pre-processing with denoise and optical corrections applied per lens before you start editing. Overlaps with Topaz on denoise; the lens correction is the real differentiator. $139.99 one-time.
• Luminar Neo - Skylum's AI editor, with sky replacement, skin and face tools, and generative object removal, usable as a Lightroom Classic plugin. One-time licenses start at $129, though the AI tools and new-feature updates are tied to a yearly renewal after the first year, so read the plan details before you buy.
• Portraiture 5 - Imagenomic's skin retouching, the long-time standard for smoothing skin while keeping its texture. $249.95 one-time for the Lightroom Classic version.
• Neurapix - learns your editing style and applies it across a whole shoot, photo by photo, with AI culling and automatic cropping and straightening on top. The first 1,000 edits are free, then it is $0.04 a photo or $49.95/month unlimited.
• LRTimelapse - if you shoot time-lapse, this is not optional. Lightroom alone handles deflickering and ramping badly, and LRTimelapse is the standard fix. From €119 one-time for a private license, with a free trial.
• Helicon Focus - focus stacking for macro and product work, with a Lightroom Classic plugin for the round trip. Licenses from $30/year or $115 lifetime.
• Negative Lab Pro - if you scan film, this converts color negatives, black-and-white negatives and slides right inside Lightroom Classic, aiming for lab-quality results. $99 one-time.
• LR/Enfuse - blends bracketed exposures into a natural-looking result, and can focus stack too. Donationware: the free version limits output to 500 pixels, and a donation removes the limit.

Prices move, so confirm the current figure on each developer's site before you buy. Most of these are one-time purchases with paid major upgrades. Topaz Photo is the clear exception, while Neurapix and Helicon Focus let you choose how you pay.

The best free Lightroom Classic plugins

Not everything worth installing costs money. These are free outright, or donationware you can use before deciding what to pay.

• Focus Points - free and open source. Shows which autofocus point actually fired on a frame, plus the faces or subjects the camera detected, for Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, OM System and more. Genuinely useful when you are diagnosing why a series came back soft, and still actively maintained (the latest release came out in January 2026).
• Jeffrey Friedl's plugin suite - exporters for Flickr, SmugMug, Zenfolio and more, plus geoencoding, a metadata viewer and other utilities. Donationware, and the closest thing Lightroom has to a standard library, with the update caveat above.
• LR/Mogrify 2 - adds watermarks, borders and text as you export. Donationware: the free version exports ten images at a time until you donate. On Windows it also needs ImageMagick 7 installed separately.
• Free tiers worth knowing - Thumbs is free for culls of up to 100 photos, and Evlaa's free plan runs two client galleries at a time.
• The built-ins you may have ignored - Publish Services, smart collections and People View ship with Lightroom and cover a surprising amount of ground. Every paid plugin above exists because a built-in ran out of road, not because the built-in was useless.

Popular plugins I left off, and why

Some names show up on almost every Lightroom plugins list but have not kept up with Lightroom Classic:

• The Fader - fades a develop preset in and out with one slider. Its download page has not moved past the Lightroom 6 era, and Lightroom Classic has had its own preset Amount slider since 2022, so you no longer need it.
• Focus Mask - highlights the sharp areas of a photo. It is still listed as an early beta for Lightroom 4 and 5, and it does not work on Windows. Focus Points (above) is the maintained way to check focus.

How to install a Lightroom Classic plugin

Installing any of these takes a couple of minutes, and the steps are the same for every Lightroom Classic plugin:

1. Download the plugin and unzip it. You will get a folder whose name ends in .lrplugin.
2. In Lightroom Classic, open File > Plug-in Manager.
3. Click Add in the bottom-left corner, select the .lrplugin folder, and click Done.
4. Restart Lightroom Classic. A green light next to the plugin name means it is installed and running.

Two notes. On Windows, unzip properly with Extract All rather than opening the zip and dragging the folder out, and do not put the plugin in Program Files - both cause the "plugin will not load" reports I get most often. And Face Tagger, Smart Search and Instagram Grid Planner start a small local helper on first launch to do the heavy lifting on your machine; if macOS asks whether to allow it, say yes. After that it is invisible. For screenshots, updating a plugin and fixing one that will not load, see the full guide on how to install a Lightroom Classic plugin.

Common questions

What are the best Lightroom plugins in 2026?

It depends entirely on the job. For editing, Topaz Photo, the Nik Collection and DxO PureRAW. For finding photos, Smart Search or Excire Search. For tagging people, Face Tagger. For culling on your phone, Thumbs. For publishing, the Google Photos and Google Drive publishers, or Jeffrey Friedl's exporters if you use Flickr or SmugMug. For a portfolio site, Keptfolio; for client proofing, Evlaa. Anyone who gives you a single answer to this question is selling one thing.

What is the difference between a Lightroom plugin and a preset?

A preset is a saved set of develop settings, so it can only move sliders Lightroom already has. A plugin is a small program that adds something Lightroom cannot do on its own: a new export destination, a search engine, face recognition, a new menu command. If you want a look, you want a preset. If you want a new capability, you want a plugin.

Where are Lightroom Classic plugins stored?

Wherever you put the .lrplugin folder when you clicked Add - File > Plug-in Manager shows the path for each one. Lightroom Classic also loads anything in its Modules folder automatically: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Modules on a Mac, or C:\Users\[you]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Modules on Windows.

Are Lightroom plugins safe to install?

A plugin is real software: it can read and write files and start other programs, the same as any app you install. So the safety question is where you download from - stick to the developer's own site, and be wary of "free" copies of paid plugins. For what it is worth, Face Tagger and Smart Search do their work locally, so nothing from your library is uploaded anywhere.

Will plugins slow Lightroom down?

The publishing plugins add almost nothing, since they only do work when you hit Publish. The local-AI plugins use your CPU or GPU while a scan is running, but that is on-demand work you start, not a background process chewing through your catalog the way People View can.

Are there free Lightroom plugins?

Yes. Focus Points is free and open source. Jeffrey Friedl's exporters and Timothy Armes' LR/Enfuse and LR/Mogrify 2 are donationware you can use before paying. Thumbs and Evlaa have free tiers. Lightroom's own built-ins - Publish Services, smart collections, People View - are free and cover a surprising amount. The paid plugins on this list earn their price at the point where a built-in starts missing things or making you do the work by hand.

Do plugins work in Lightroom (the cloud one) or on mobile?

No. Plugins are a Lightroom Classic feature. The cloud-based Lightroom desktop app and the mobile apps have no plugin support, so there is no way to load one there. The usual workaround is to send a photo from Lightroom to Photoshop and run the plugin there. I went into why in why Lightroom CC has no plugins.

Mac or Windows?

The Google Photos and Google Drive publishers, Look Slots and Keptfolio are pure Lua and run on both Mac and Windows. Face Tagger, Smart Search and Instagram Grid Planner currently ship for Apple Silicon Macs, since they bundle a native runtime. Thumbs runs with Lightroom Classic on a Mac and has not been tested on Windows yet. Most of the third-party plugins above support both systems; check each product page for the latest platform support before you buy.

One-time or subscription?

From me, everything is a one-time purchase except Keptfolio ($69/year or $7/month, because it includes hosting your portfolio site) and Thumbs ($29/year or $5/month for full shoots, with a free tier). Among the third-party tools, most are one-time purchases with paid major upgrades. Topaz Photo is subscription-only, Neurapix is pay-per-photo or monthly, and Helicon Focus offers both yearly and lifetime licenses.