Wednesday 4 April 2007

What's all the Lightroom fuss?

River in Tsetserleg, Mongolia, September 2006

There's been a lot of fuss over Adobe's latest behemoth, Lightroom. Digital Asset Management (DAM) - filing ones photos in other words - is all the rage. Maybe I don't take enough photos but I just don't see the point.
There are other programs that will allow you to do large batch RAW conversions (I like capture One, myself for that) and a good filing system & taxonomy should make it easy to find photos. All that I'm currently missing is some sort of index to link all the versions of a particular shot, and I suppose that the search features within Windows would help me out there, coupled to my index numbering system.

Shot above is a case in point. I was browsing through some old photos and some of the portfolio/stock stuff I've got and decided this could be better. It was a short hop to find the original and use the linked Lightzone file to make some improvements. As all the developed stuff is filed away by trip & date, and is cataloged with a date, cross-referencing is relatively easy.

Can't say I'd even need the ability to link Lightroom directly to an editor - Windows file associations can take care of that for me, quite easily. With the right click settings, one can even generate a list of possible editors.

As I said at the top, maybe I'm missing something about Lightroom because I'm clearly not understanding the fuss.

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