Today’s Question: I don’t know what happened, but suddenly the left and right panels in Lightroom Classic disappear every time I move the mouse away from them. I have to click at the edge of the screen to make the panel come back, but as soon as I move my mouse away it disappears again. How can I stop this from happening?!
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can simply disable the auto-hide feature for the panels by right-clicking at the edge of the Lightroom Classic interface and choosing “Manual” from the popup.
More Detail: By default, panels in Lightroom Classic are in manual mode, meaning you can click on the outside edge of a panel to hide it, and click again at that edge to reveal the panel again. However, there are also options for automatically hiding and revealing panels.
If you right-click on the outside edge of a panel, you’ll see a popup with options related to the panel behavior. If you choose “Auto Hide & Show”, the panel will be hidden once you move your mouse away from the panel, and it will be displayed if you move your mouse over the “stub” at the outside edge of the Lightroom Classic interface.
If you choose “Auto Hide” from the popup (which from the description in today’s question is the issue involved here) the panel will hide whenever you move the mouse away from it, but you must click on the outside edge of the interface to bring the panel back.
So, in this case, simply choosing “Manual” from the popup menu will get the intended behavior, where you need to click to hide or reveal a panel.
Note, by the way, that there is also an option for “Sync with Opposite Panel” on the popup menu associated with the outside edge of panels. If you turn this option on, the left and right panels will operate as a set and the top and bottom panels will operate as a set. That means, for example, that with the sync option enabled if you hide the left panel the right panel will also be hidden.
