Sysadmin Field Notes

February 21, 2007

Adobe Lightroom is now available.

I've used it since the first beta, and it is an excellent workflow tool for "developing" photos from a digital camera. The 1.0 adds some speed in the develop module, the best healing tool interface I've seen, some auto-masking features (called targeted adjustments). The develop module basically gets even better. Slideshow, print, and Web all finally get up to snuff as well.

On the downside, I still think the library module is a mess. I even think it's more schizophrenic than it was in the betas. The betas mostly abstracted physical locations away from you, by just putting your photos into the library and organizing them by shoots. It didn't do as nice a job of that abstraction as Aperture or iPhoto, but it tried.

Now that's been dumped and it's more of a filesystem interface. You can still organize into arbitrary shoots, but the default is folders, which actually correspond to disk folders. So it's like a file browser, except files still have to be in the lightroom db to store their settings (or have XMP sidecars). That scheme probably works better for people using a lot of other tools or fitting into bigger workflows. They did add tools to help update files that were updated outside of lightroom, or find files that have been moved.

Sadly, it's still slow as all get-out for just browsing through tons of pictures with small thumbnails. What I really want is to be able to figure out how to use iPhoto and Lightroom together better. Lightroom is choking on me now if I view all photographs (3660 or so), whereas iPhoto can zoom through the 10000 in my library there with ease). I want speed/browsing in the library like iPhoto (and the mac integration; screen-savers, remote photo viewing via front-row, etc.) but with lightroom's selection/picking interface and develop module.

I'm trying Picturesync a bit to see if that works as a good bridge, but not getting exactly what I want there.

I might try importing the iPhoto files into Lightroom in-place..I fear that might do terrible things though, but it might be what I want.

Once the Lightroom SDK comes out, maybe there will be some interesting things we can do there.

Here's my first Lightroom 1.0 gallery.