Digital photo management, unleashed.

Built for speed, easy to share

The Adobe Lightroom software development kit (SDK) gives you a clean, fast, lightweight toolset for enhancing and extending the capabilities of the leading image management and sharing software. Plug-ins you build in Lua, the scripting language built into Lightroom, and the Lightroom SDK let you create effects, define image processing presets and brushes, add items to Lightroom menus and dialogs, manipulate metadata, and create new types of web galleries for your images.

The guides, documentation, and sample code in the SDK shows you how to leverage Lua to access the Lightroom API, opening the power of the app to your control. Your plug-ins can be given away or sold in the Adobe Exchange marketplace where users can browse and install extensions. Download the SDK today and discover the power to enhance and extend Lightroom as you see fit.

Start building today

A light, clean, simple coding environment

With Lua, the scripting language, and the Lightroom SDK, you can quickly develop plug-ins in your favorite editing tools or even a simple text editor.

Exercise absolute image control

Build Develop presets, custom export settings, metadata management, and more—on individual images and entire image libraries.

Connect to 3rd party websites

Connect Lightroom with 3rd party websites for easy and quick sharing.

Leverage the power of Lua

Lightroom incorporates Lua, a lightweight, powerful, and portable scripting language, for developing your plug-ins. Lightroom enhances Lua with a custom object-oriented infrastructure that gives you access to the API.

Customize export and publish

Lua and the Lightroom API let you customize the export and publishing processes: alter the rendering process, send rendered files to alternative locations, change the export and publish dialogs, and define post-processing functions.

Work with metadata

Define customized public or private metadata fields for Lightroom to be associated with individual photos. You can also define new ways of arranging the display of metadata within the Library module’s Metadata panel.

Enhance the Lightroom UI

Build custom sections for the Plug-in Manager or Export dialogs. Display or enhance predefined dialogs and write your own custom ones. Add menu items to give users access to your custom functionality.

Build web engine plug-ins

Create an HTML web-engine plug-in to define a new type of HTML photo gallery. Your web-engine plug-ins let you build new layouts and processing capabilities into photo galleries shared on the web.