I installed the most recent update and indexed my top-level photo library folder - now all my projects have the same local adjustments. The masks are from a project that won’t load anymore (gets stuck previewing) - what is going on? This is affecting months of work. Has anyone else had this problem? I’m moving up to doing commercial work soon and there’s no way I can rely on PL9 with issues like this;’ disappointing. I def did not accidentally copy/paste the corrections settings.
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Looks like you’re having issues with local adjustments. Your December 2025 post was about LA issues too…
Have you contacted support with a request on support.dxo.com?
Imo, PhotoLab is not suited for pro use yet. Other products are more mature and reliable, some can cooperate with PhotoLab, so you can have their reliability combined with PL key features vie use a s preprocessor or plugin.
I do a lot of testing and fooling around on my Macs and have prepared them in a way to minimise impact and, hence, restore times. Some of it is explained in posts in the forum.
I’m a long time owner of PL since about version 5 or 6, however it has not been until the last month where i have really started using it just about every day, and i have a list that is far too long that i’m keeping to submit to support, and your experience with projects is same as mine. In any sane world the idea of projects with their own folders you would think that changing photos in one project would not affect the same photos in a different project. Nope! and no warning either. It’s a poorly implemented concept of projects at best. I ended up creating multiple projects to test out different settings from a recent viewing of the Artemis II launch, initially I thought Virtual copies would be the best way, nope, good luck with filtering them! And no sorting by Image additions order doesn’t work, mine show V, M, V, M…. so i have to pick everything manually now to delete virtual copies, what ?? So thats how i decided to try multiple projects only to find this garbage implementation. Then there is the complete hanging of PL 9.7 when scrolling through projects that has happened many times, i’ve got no folder with more than 50 photos.
Projects and virtual copies are a disaster, stay away!
I’ve started managing my own folders of symlinks to RAW’s and let Git do version control on changes to the .dops and navigate them as regular folders until DxO can fix this projects/virtual copies mess.
PhotoLab projects are collections of links pointing to the original files. The links look like the image, but again, it’s the original image and not a copy. Changing an image in a project therefore changes the appearance of the file in all projects.
Imagine a boxer getting a black eye in a fight. The boxer will have the black eye when shopping, getting his kids from Kindergarden and enjoying a TV show.
To prevent “the black eye from wandering” (it doesn’t, as explained above), use virtual copies. Spreading several VCs over several projects can be challenging. It’s probably best to NOT mix Projects and VCs.
Projects help to save drive space by NOT having to copy images to several folders. And although a project structure can look like a structure of folders, none of these apparent folders exist, except as logical units in PhotoLab’s database.
I don’t think any photo editing software out there does anything like this, that I’m aware of.
In Lightroom and in Capture One–which has Collections and Albums as analogs, respectively, to PhotoLab’s projects–you could create two projects and add the same photos to each. If you make any adjustments to the photos in one Collection/Album (Project) then that change is reflected in the other Collection/Album (Project). This is because, as @platypus describes, they are just pointing to the same exact photo in your catalog.
Collections & Albums & Projects are simply an effort to let you organize the photos in different ways, like if you have family vacation photos in one Project called “Family”, but some of them are architectural from the cathedrals in France, and you want to put that in a separate Project called “Architecture” as well. We’d expect the edits to be seen in both projects.
Perhaps it’s the naming (Projects) that PhotoLab used which isn’t communicating their use very well (as often happens in DxO’s products – like “Customize” for the area of editing photos). I can see that the world “Project” kind of sounds like it is it’s own area for working on things.
The idea of a sandboxed area within the app, where one can make edits to photos which don’t in turn reflect on the same photo elsewhere in the app (as I believe you’re describing) is definitely an interesting and probably useful one, but as I said, I don’t know of any major photo editing software that behaves this way.
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Let’s have a look at the following scenario:
There’s a bunch of images and you want to create several projects in which different development settings are to be applied.
This scenario can come to life as follows:
- create and name projects, e.g. P1_HDR and P2_B&W
- make virtual copies of selected images and put them in P1…
- make another set of VCs an put it in P2…
- open P1… and apply HDR settings
- open P2… and apply B&W settings
This setup helps to isolate VCs which can make editing less complex because you only have to deal with one kind of target look for all images in the project(s). And as long as there is no filter and/or search for VCs, the above is the only way to go with PhotoLab. Note that looking at the source folder(s) will show all versions side-by side:
This workaround sounds convoluted to begin with, but as long as the number of source folders, images and projects is sensible, it’s easily doable. Just take care to add to the project the lates VCs before creating the next set of VCs!
I also tried with a source- and several target projects. Does not help much, VCs are added, not moved to a different project
Sounds like “pro use” overuse 
The OP problem wasn’t defined precisely enough to reproduce it, so I’ll skip it for now.
This is exactly why I am so frustrated. To me the term project implies (rationally so, I think) “a selection of pictures for editing which is distinct/separate from the source files” or however you wish to phrase it. If they were called albums I would not have made that assumption.