Speed Up Your Lightroom Editing Using a GamePad Controller

A little while ago, we introduced you to photographer Ed Pingol’s Cullinator, a Mac app that played nice with a PC gaming controller and helped you to significantly speed up your Lightroom workflow. As many of you pointed out, however, the Cullinator could easily be turned into a DIY project, and it looks like photographer Paul Snow of Photo Thoughts was listening.

In a step-by-step blog post, Snow details how to take a $25 Logitec F310 GamePad and customize it using the pad’s own profile tool until it works with Lightroom.

His sample configuration has only been tried on Windows, but it should work on Mac as well. To set up your own GamePad with Lightroom, you first have to open up the profile tool that comes with the controller. This is meant to help you set up the controller to work with games that it doesn’t immediately support.

Once the tool is open, you can use it to assign each button to a designated keystroke or mouse click.

For his set up, Snow uses the D-Pad and/or left stick to replace the arrow keys; the left stick button as a zoom, zoom in, back to grid cycle based on the enter key; the right stick as the mouse; the left top button as right click; the right top button as a star rating cycle; the right bottom button as a flags cycle; the A button as the enter key; and the X button as a flag color cycle.

Of course, you can set up your own commands based on what feels most natural to you, but Snow’s configuration gives you a place to start. Head over to Snow’s blog to get his step-by-step instructions, including his ready-made XML config file.

Speed Up Lightroom with a GamePad Controller [Photo Thoughts]