Creating a preset silently fails when the name contains a slash

[Gin-San]

I found that creating a preset with a slash ( / ) character in it silently fails. As in, in the preset panel, you click "Create" and the panel closes, but the preset isn't created. There is no feedback at all and no indication as to what happened. This is a very poor user experience, I tried all sorts of troubleshooting steps before trying a name without the slash in it. I have only confirmed this behavior for the slash character, though I suppose this happens with any and all unsupported characters. There should be some kind of warning or information that the name is invalid. Since the preset names are used as filenames for the preset file, I suppose the slash fails because it isn't allowed in filenames in Windows. I don't think it would be too hard to convert the unsupported characters to an underscore or something for the filename ... but even if you can't do that for some reason, it definitely shouldn't just fail silently. Thanks .

Lightroom Classic version: 7.3.1 [ 1167660 ]

License: Creative Cloud

Language setting: en

Operating system: Windows 10 - Home Premium Edition

Version: 10.0.16299

[JohanElzenga]

Yes, I've seen the same thing with a user who saved a preset with a colon in the name. That too will fail. What actually happens is that a file is created with just the part in front of the slash as name, and no file extension. Don't use (illegal) characters that you wouldn't use in a file name either (because presets must be saved as files).

[Gin-San]

That's really strange undocumented behavior. The name should never be directly used as a filename, there should be a difference between the filename and the formatted name string. What if I want to use diacritics in the name? In German those are very common, but having a diacritic in a filename can lead to all sorts of bugs depending on the OS. Also, it wouldn't be hard at all to rewrite those unsupported characters to a generic placeholder such as an underscore and still use the name the user wrote for the actual name of the preset, which seems to be contained in the XMP file. I confirmed that the name shows up correctly when I change it in the XMP after I created the preset:

Before:

<rdf:li xml:lang="x-default">Modern _ Warm</rdf:li>

After:

<rdf:li xml:lang="x-default">Modern/Warm</rdf:li>

After changing this, the name shows up correctly in the Program. So it's really an arbitrary restriction that shouldn't exist. And again, even if it can't or won't be fixed, there should at least be some sort of error message or warning regarding the invalid name.

[JohanElzenga · Accepted solution]

It’s a bug, and I have already reported it.