Losing printer profiles in Lightroom 6

I’m still using Lightroom 6.14 because I decided I wasn’t going to take out a subscription following Adobe’s licensing changes. My cameras are fully supported by 6.14 and, although I would like to be able to use some of the newer enhancements to Lightroom Classic CC, I can live without them for now.

Some time early in July, I updated my PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I’d tried upgrading not long after Windows 10 was released and hated it, and so almost immediately rolled back the upgrade. The rollback was not without its problems and it took me a day or two to get things back as they should be. Fast forward to July 2019 and, with Windows 7 reaching end-of-life in January 2020, I decided to attempt the upgrade again. Some significant changes had been made to Windows 10 by then so I was hopeful things would work out better. And to a large extent they did. While I miss a few things from Windows 7, Windows 10 is actually quite nice.

The upgrade was fairly painless and all the software I use regularly seems to work just fine. One thing I hadn’t tried until the last day or two, was printing from within Lightroom. Like many Lightroom users, I suspect, I have quite a number of print module templates. These are so convenient, they are one of the main reasons I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Lightroom.

One of the big benefits of print templates is that, once you’ve set up your print layout and the various printer settings (paper type, paper size, print and quality settings, colour management, etc.) and selected the appropriate printer profile, if you then save the layout as a template, all of the printer settings are saved with it. This means that the next time you use that template, all the printer settings are already set to the values you want to use.

When I went to print something the other day, I selected the template I normally use for the type of image I was printing and just happened to notice that the printer profile was set to “Managed by printer” rather than the paper/printer specific profile that I expected to see. Further investigation showed that all of my templates had suffered the same change – not one had the previously selected printer profile set; they were all leaving colour management to the printer.

It took an hour or so for me to work through each template, setting the profile to the correct one and then saving the settings back to the template. I could have waited until I used each template, I suppose, and corrected each one as needed but I decided I might just miss the fact that the settings were incorrect at some point and unnecessarily waste a print.

I can’t be 100% certain that the upgrade to Windows 10 caused the problem, but it does seem to be the most likely candidate. I did search for any other descriptions of this issue but without success… there were a couple of things relating printer profile quirks to Windows 10, but not an exact match for the issue I observed. Anyway, I thought I’d post this as it may be useful to someone.

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