Lightroom Tips

Tip – Rotating Identity Plates in Slideshow

Your tip for today falls victim to one of those little things that I never knew about before and found out about the hard way. It has to do with the Slideshow module. You know how you can put an Identity Plate on your slideshow right? You can also put other various text overlays that show some metadata about your photo (which is exactly what people really want to see when they’re watching a beautiful slideshow by the way) 🙂

Anyway, I ran into some one who showed me their computer and the fact that their ID Plate was rotated 90°. Naturally, I’m used to working with the ID Plate in the Print module so I just assumed there’d be a little rotation option next to it like there is in Print (you know, 0°, 90°, 180°). But there’s not. I sat there stumped for about 3-4 minutes trying to figure out why their ID Plate was sideways. Finally, I just switched Slideshow presets for them and the ID Plate showed up the way it was supposed to.

But for the next 5 nights I couldn’t sleep because it just didn’t make sense (ok maybe not, but it really did bug me). Finally, while working on something in the Slideshow module today I realized there’s two little rotation icons in the toolboar (see the image for this post in the top left). I realized they’re not for rotating your photo but for rotating any text overlays that you’ve added to the slides. In fact, unless you have text overlays on the slide they’re grayed out.

I know! It’s a tiny thing but hopefully I saved you much frustration and many sleepless nights if you ever run into this. Take care and have a great weekend.

Share: