Nixta Sinks

I've spent the last couple of days playing with the Adobe Lightroom beta. Photoshop is fantastic for a) breaking the brains of anyone who doesn't do graphical editing professionally and (perhaps more importantly) b) providing some pretty solid editing tools on a photo-by-photo basis.

In CS (as best as I can tell), Adobe introduced the FileBrowser, which performed all the tasks that Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder ought to do with photographs (and video, and pdf, and actually, anything). That is, provide an easily modifiable interface for viewing visual files in groups, and providing meta-data on them. The two bits of functionality it provides for that are variable-sized thumbnails and a panel to show the EXIF data, also rotating images according to the EXIF information.

But that's about it. In terms of organising and display, Flickr is probably as good a tool as any for the layman, and a great example of what a web-application ought to be, by the way. In the three days I've been using Lightroom, I've become as dependent upon it as on YouTube for entertainment or indeed my cellphone for communication (which for so long never seemed such an urgent task). So far I've used it for organising photographs. It of course does a great deal more, but here's a list of things it does remarkably well:

• Demonstrate intuitive responsive user interface
• Provide side-by-side comparison of similar photographs
• Allow easy and quick organisation of photo libraries
• Allow real-time application of graphical processing tools to an un-touched library of original raw photographs
• Allow full organisation and filtering based on EXIF information and supplemental attribution

Come on. Be honest. What more could you want from a piece of image-organising software?

My dilemma is two-fold (is that four lemmas?) and runs like this: When the final version is released, will it be bundled with Adobe Creative Suite, and should I buy a MacBook on which to run it?

I heartily recommend watching the occasionally patronising Adobe videos that accompany Lightroom to get a feel for how it works.

In contrast, as an example of how software should not be written, read here and weep about how terribly Microsoft Word's outline-numbering system has been destroyed in the name of progress.

Oh, and as promised, more photos from the holiday (and a Bonushoff or two):

• Part 1 (Slovenia, Florence, Rome, Sicily)
• Part 2 (Italy Cave Town, Croatia)
• Part 3 (Croatia and Slovenia)
• Part 4 (Florence, Rome, Ravello)
• Knight Industries Two Thousand
• Marylebone On Fire

And I've just found yet another set of holiday photos to put up. Now, what I really want is to take a Lightroom set and post that to Flickr. I give it 6 months post-Lightroom release (if Adobe provide a plug-in API, I give it 2 months).