Lightroom Classic 9.3 released

[Geoff F]

Thanks for the tips. Next wet and windy day I will have another look at Lightroom and see if I can enter the search system. If I can find a 'directory tree' I might get somewhere and use it for some file searches.

Last time I tried it for some searching I ended up with hundreds of files, probably everything on my computer, and it just overwhelmed me until it ground to a halt.

I find ACR and Bridge do well for me and Photoshop will remain my photo editor but Lightroom could be worthwhile for those occasions where Bridge is too limiting.

[DanK]

Last time I tried it for some searching I ended up with hundreds of files, probably everything on my computer, and it just overwhelmed me until it ground to a halt.

This is a guess, but I think I may know what happened. If you tell Lightroom to import a directory and its subdirectories, it will try to get everything. On one of my drives, I have a few top-level directories that contain photos. My main directory for serious photos is named, originally, "photos". Everything underneath that directory is files that I want in the same catalog. When I created my main Lightroom photos, I just pointed to Photos and imported it. I think I may have had to tell it to import subdirectories too, but it was so long ago that I don't recall.

What I see in the left panel in the library module is the file structure, starting from photos and going down.

Although many people don't do this, I have a few different catalogs. For example, I have one for each of my kids' weddings. I see no reason to clutter up my main catalog with these, as I only go back to them rarely at this point.

[Manfred M]

You don't need to scroll in LR if you don't want to. That's the purpose of solo mode, which you can replicate in the new ACR by putting the filmstrip on the left. Here's a screenshot of my develop panel in solo mode:

When you open any of these, whatever you have open will close automatically. It's functionally not much different from the old ACR, which had the icons on the top border and the open function on the right. In both cases, each function has one icon or link, and when you click on it, the relevant dialog opens.

Sorry Dan for not being clear enough. It's not the images that I'm writing about, but the main panels like Basic, Curve, Detail, etc. These were arranged differently and were larger and more accessible in the older versions of ACR. These were opened by a horizontal row of tabs and now one has to move downwards. The fonts and controls are now small, just like in LR, and that's the part of the user interface I don't like.

I don't understand this. In what way? I have my work organized by shoots, which your post suggests you also do. LR doesn't conflict with that. However, it allows me to overlay lots of other variables on top of that, if I choose to. So, for example, I have a dozen prints from a dozen different shoots over perhaps 4 years in one exhibit. Lightroom makes it trivially easy to go back to that set when I want to, even though the set spans 12 shoots. This doesn't require that the base organization be any different. It just gives me additional options.

The issue I have is still with the awkwardness of the catalog. When I do use Lightroom, I prefer having a single catalog per project. One can't just pick an old catalog to start working on a file in it, but Lightroom has to shut down and start up again. That's one aspect of LR I've always disliked. I suspect that this is philosophical on Adobe's part. They recommend a single monolithic database and anyone not following their recommendation has to jump through a few hoops to use the tool.

The second part is the huge amount of space that the catalog itself takes up on the hard drive. Less of an issue on my desktop, where I have huge hard drives, but more so on my laptop where I don't. Everytime I finish an edit, I end up deleting the catalog to free up disk space.

Being forced to use the relatively slow file management routines of LR, versus the relatively fast response of MS Explorer is the other thing that bothers me about that software. If one isn't careful, one loses the location of the file and it can be a pain to find and link with LR.

My primary way of locating files to edit is through Windows Explorer and my secondary approach is Adobe Bridge, which doesn't have many of the handcuffs or bloat of Lightroom.

[rpcrowe]

I wonder...

Could I use Adobe bridge to select images shot with a specific camera or lens; or even images shot at a specific shutter speed, f/stop, focal length (or range); or even a specific ISO???

[Manfred M]

I wonder...

Could I use Adobe bridge to select images shot with a specific camera or lens; or even images shot at a specific shutter speed, f/stop, focal length (or range); or even a specific ISO???

Short answer is yes, but all of the images have to be in the same folder. I suspect you could put all the images into a collection and find them that way as well, but this is not a feature I would use.

[davidedric]

The second part is the huge amount of space that the catalog itself takes up on the hard drive. Less of an issue on my desktop, where I have huge hard drives, but more so on my laptop where I don't. Everytime I finish an edit, I end up deleting the catalog to free up disk space

That really surprises me. With a 20,000 photo catalogue mine is only 300Mb, though obviously the previews are much bigger. What sort of size are you seeing?

[Manfred M]

That really surprises me. With a 20,000 photo catalogue mine is only 300Mb, though obviously the previews are much bigger. What sort of size are you seeing?

The issue are the previews. I like working with high quality image when deciding which ones to keep and which ones to cull. Every time I delete a catalog, I recover gigabytes worth of storage.

[davidedric]

The issue are the previews. I like working with high quality image when deciding which ones to keep and which ones to cull. Every time I delete a catalog, I recover gigabytes worth of storage.

If space were a problem for me, I'd just delete the previews, and let Lightroom rebuild them one at a time when I wanted to work on one. I guess that may not suit your workflow. Do you write edits out to .xmp, or do you just not use Lightroom for editing and use ACR instead

[Manfred M]

If space were a problem for me, I'd just delete the previews, and let Lightroom rebuild them one at a time when I wanted to work on one. I guess that may not suit your workflow. Do you write edits out to .xmp, or do you just not use Lightroom for editing and use ACR instead

I use Lightroom when I cull a large shoot and when I try to find where the image was taken from (using the Maps Module in Lightroom in conjunction with GPS data collected on the shot). I strongly dislike the user interface in the Develop Module and now that Adobe has pushed that down to us ACR users, I am looking at my options.

From a philosophical standpoint, I do not like large monolithic databases; I've had significant issues with Lightroom's a couple of times in the past (corruption, including the backup), so I have stayed away from catalogs ever since.

Right now I have started to use DxO PhotoLab 3 as my go to raw convertor (something I did until Photoshop CS4), but am also working with Capture One. The main advantage that ACR continues to offer is native support for SmartObjects and L*a*b* colour space. I use SmartObjects a lot and L*a*b* every so often as well.

I use Capture One for tethered capture and it far superior to Lightroom there, but its features (layers) do not fit into my raw workflow needs right now.

[davidedric]

Thanks, Manfred, very interesting. I'm also using PhotoLab as my raw converter, and to cull.

Back in the early eighties, my team and I were pretty early adopters of relational technology (we had some particular problems to solve in handling laboratory data) so I'm quite happy with managing "monolithic" databases.

Regards, Dave

[DanK]

In all the years I have used Lightroom, I had a serious problem with a catalog only once, and that was a long time and many versions ago. Because I save edits in XML sidecar files rather than in the catalog, the absolute worst case scenario is to tell LR to build a new catalog. My recollection is that you lose the history panel (which ACR lacks anyway), but the edits are all there.

[Manfred M]

In all the years I have used Lightroom, I had a serious problem with a catalog only once, and that was a long time and many versions ago. Because I save edits in XML sidecar files rather than in the catalog, the absolute worst case scenario is to tell LR to build a new catalog. My recollection is that you lose the history panel (which ACR lacks anyway), but the edits are all there.

My mistake was to go the recommended route with the catalog and store the edits there. Both times I had failures both the main catalog and the backups had been corrupted. Adobe was unable to restore the catalog both times, so I have not been back since and have no intention of doing so.

My current workflow is so heavily Photoshop based that I can recreate anything I need in the raw processor in less than a minute for any image, so I don't even care about what the .xmp file holds. I don't like the new ACR user interface at all, hence my often heading over to Photolab or Capture One (which shares some of the problems I have with Lightroom, but has a work around by using Sessions, as opposed to the catalog). The main issue I have with Capture One is the user interface is unusually convoluted for what I want to do.