Adobe Lightroom is by far the best software for managing your massive digital photo collection. I love it. I really do. It lets me crop, tweak colors, add meta data, sort, file, build web pages, and more. And it is great at everything it does. It is not perfect and doesn’t do everything I want it to… but it is clearly on the road for sustained success. I really like it.
And now that they have fixed the printing issue (was only occuring to a small, but distinguished group), it is truly a great place to print individual photos or standard photo packates.
BUT, Adobe has a long way to go to make this the software I would call near perfect.
Here are my feature requests for this venerable and otherwise great software:
1. When I take a lot of photos, I like to print them out for the people in the picture. So I’d like to see a feature where I can select a specific number of photos for each individual photo to be printed. (i.e. 5 of #2, 4 of #1, etc.)
2. My still camera camera takes video. My video camera takes still photos. I’d like to be able to load both video and still images into the computer using Lightroom.
3. Lightroom does not have an effective tool to deal with duplicates. And if you delete or move photos outside of lightroom, it gets confused. I’d like an active tool to help me see where images are, if they’ve moved, if I accidently duplicated them–or even intentionally duplicated them (like to send an e-mail 2 years ago). I’d like the tool to recognize the photo not only by the name, but by the content of the photo. Identical images but one is inferior quality, smaller size etc. Then let me cull this growing pile of duplicates with some automation!
4. Face recognition is neat. It is here. Hello Adobe?
5. After upgrading Lightroom, it cannot find my card reader. It used to open up automagically to import photos when I slid my cards into the reader. I’d like Lightroom to notice this and turn the auto feature back on. (I did it manually and it still doesn’t work…hmmmm)
6. I’d like a better system for swapping images and image libraries between computers. I use two and would like to have access from both machines….Hmmmmmm.
7. Remote server. Planning on moving *some* of my photos to a remote server. I wish Lightroom could handle two libraries simultaneously. Why do I have to hard close out one to use another….Grrrrr.
8. The pop out/pop in menus are great. Kind of….they keep popping in and out when I wanted to do something different. Can we get some protectors to turn off the popping when we know we’ll be hovering the mouse in that general area?
9. When loading images from a card, I’d like to (in one step) apply mass Meta data. I’d like to select x-y photos and tag them with “Tokyo”, then tag a-f with “Football”, and j-m with “Kids”, etc. Why not at this stage? Why do I have to tag all of the photos at once? Come on Adobe…work with me…
10. Not sure why, but sometimes the filters are on the top of the page, sometimes a few are on the bottom. Sometimes my favorite filters are there (pick, unpick, trash); and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes I can’t tell if a fiter is selected or not and I have to click it on and off to verify….can we fix all this so there is less guesswork?
Lot’s more like this….but I think 10 is a good place to take a break….
Cheers, D
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O.K. I’ve finally got Lightroom to print colors properly. And the funny thing is, I can’t retrace my steps to figure out what I did correctly. The only thing that I can recall that was the trigger, was updating to Lightroom 2.1. Hopefully there are no more painful moments.
I wish now that I could handle videos using Lightroom, easily find duplicates, and learn to use the new develop tools (I haven’t taken the time to figure this out).
And at the same time, I am learning Dreamweaver 8 (not interested in the MX upgrade) while polishing php and MySQL code for my next project.