I was just doing a first-pass photo edit in Lightroom, arrowing through images rather quickly and adding ones that I wanted to look at again to a Target Collection. In doing so though at some point I realized, “wow there's a lot of stuff happening on screen at once”. And I found it really, really distracting!

Here's what I'm talking about. If you're in the Develop module, with the left, right and bottom panels open, every time you arrow to another picture, all of these things happen on screen — and not all at once!

• The main image changes (obviously)
• Then you see the next thumbnail get selected. At this same time you also see:
  • On the right side of the screen, all Develop modules go dim (since they aren't available while the image is loading)
  • The histogram disappears
  • On the left side of the screen, the Presets and History go dim
  • The Copy, Paste, Previous and Next buttons go dim
• Then you see all of the above things that just went dim, flash bright again
• Then you see the row of thumbnails slide to the left so the newly selected image is now in the middle
  • At the same time this happens, the badges on the thumbnails disappear
• Then the badges reappear

Here's a video of this happening…

Wow that's annoying! So how do you avoid all this?

By simply hiding the panels.

You can do that either by clicking this arrow on each panel…

click on this arrow (on bottom and sides) to hide the panel

Or even better, there's a magical keyboard shortcut that hides ALL of them at once. Two, actually, that are worth remembering:

• Tab ⇥ (Toggle Side Panels)
• Shift-Tab ⇧⇥ (Toggle All Panels)

Tab and Shift-Tab are your friends to hide the clutter

You may of course want those thumbnails underneath to see what's coming up next — in which case, just hit the Tab key and hide the stuff on the sides. Or if you want a clean screen, Shift-Tab is your friend.