I've always been pretty dubious about Lightroom's Web module. The underlying architecture, based on XML, is very elegantly done and intellectually fascinating. But it moves template customization right out of the reach of the mass of users who happily customized their previous cataloguing programs' web galleries. It's a solution for developers, not users. And then there's all the time it spends churning through the raw files to generate web jpegs - after you've already gone to the trouble of telling it to generate 1:1 previews.

While I've been happy enough continuing to generate my private web galleries with iView, I have also played with Lightroom's templates, and the image shows one that has ratings displayed on the thumbnail and which replaces the item number with my unique 6 character reference code (positions 8-13 of my originals' filenames eg “YYMMDD_123456 something.dng”).

But I am glad to say I have been proved wrong about how many people would take up the challenge of producing alternative galleries. Answering a query on changing the Lightroom Web galleries, I thought I'd list the resources that might help others wanting to have a go.

• Start at Sean MacCormack and here
• After a dubious start, spamming web forums for a content-free site, Joe at Lightroom Galleries is now producing templates (including a feedback form) and has some very well-written tutorials.
• Chris Shepherd has integrated Lightroom galleries with Paypal for transaction processing.
• For more of a turnkey solution, Matthew Campagna at The Turning Gate is concentrating on Flash-based galleries. The only problem is keeping up with the furious pace at which he releases new galleries and updates.
• BlueFire designed the Flash galleries supplied with Lightroom and have extensive notes.
• The Adobe Media Gallery framework is documented here
• The Flash source files are open source.
• Lastly, via Lightroom Journal, the development team's blog, you can get Airtight's SimpleViewer, PostcardViewer, and AutoViewer.

The latest Lightroom podcast is one of the better ones and features the program's database designer Eric Scouten. There's little of the image processing stuff that Adobe finds easiest and much more about managing the pixel mountain from someone who sounds as if he really understands the problems users have in this area.

One of the most salient points is the mention of smart collections for v2 which Eric speaks about both in terms of saving queries that help you find groups of pictures, such as files with keywords X and Y shot in country X over a certain period, and in terms of managing your workflow. So you might work through a job by set up a checklist-style series of queries that first list all the items that you've not yet captioned , then the ones with no keywords, those without copyright notices, and so on. Lightroom's a database application and user-definable queries, even with a dumbed down name such as smart albums or smart collections, are sorely needed. It's great to hear that need being voiced.

Also take a look at Eric's web site. I like the “humor” section most.

Lightroom normally exports files into a single target folder, but it's not an unusual to want those exported files to be in date-based folders - that's especially true if your originals were organized in a date-based folder hierarchy. It's not as awkward as you might think.

First open the Export dialog and make sure Lightroom is listed as a choice in the After Export drop down box. If not, go to the Export Actions folder (the last choice in the drop down) and add a program shortcut/alias to Lightroom.

Then export the files as normal to a single folder, and set Lightroom as the post processing step. As soon as the export is finished, this makes Lightroom import the exported files into the catalogue. The important things are to:

• Set the File Handling option to “Move photos to a new location and import”
• Set the Organize option to one of the date choices or by original folders

How's that? This obviously works best for a date or folder export. Ideally all export features should be able to reflect the hierarchy (eg from a keyword or collection) from which they're launched.

When you write a book on version 1.0 of a program, things are very much in flux. Apart from your publisher's deadline. Features change subtly and others are pulled at the last minute, or later, and you're never going to anticipate what might will appear in a dot release just a few months later - days after your book hits the streets. So while I'm not going to list the detailed changes (I recommend reading through this list of changes), this is the first of a few notes on how to take advantage of what's in Lightroom 1.1.

Given my interest in DAM, one of the most welcome changes is the how Lightroom now handles virtual copies, alternative versions of your pictures. 1.0 had no smart way of selecting virtual copies unless you marked them immediately after they were created (eg adding them to a collection, adding a keyword, or amending some other field). This meant you had to be very disciplined - and that wasn't a convincing or robust solution. But now:

• Every virtual copy has a name, like Copy 1, which you can edit - eg “B&W”
• The Find panel can search for VC names - point the drop down box to Copy Name
• Also in Find, keying in a file name makes Lightroom list both the master and its VCs.
• The Filmstrip (F6) now lets you filter for master images or virtual copies.
• The New Collection dialog box now has an option to create new virtual copies.

The last point is perhaps the least noticeable change, and not an obvious way to create new VCs, but it may be the most powerful.

When it's ticked, Lightroom adds the VCs and not the master images to the new Collection. This is a smart move because, especially when you're working with lots of pictures, a Collection remains the fastest way to select your virtual copies - grouping all the black and whites for a job, or all the alternative crops etc. It's certainly faster than filtering on the date or keyword or whatever, and then on virtual copies in the Filmstrip. I'm tempted to say forget other methods of creating VCs - the shortcut's Ctrl/Cmd N.

William Neill's a photographer whose work I've liked ever since chatting to him on a bridge in Yosemite and then seeing his show down at the Ansel Adams Gallery. He lives in the area but his pictures are so far away from the postcard cliches. It was only a short conversation, but I bought his book afterwards and it made a lasting impact on what I think is possible in landscape photography.

So I keep going back to his site, which has changed little since 1998 other than the addition of a photo showing he's gone digital - he seemed very much a large format guy. But now there's a lot of new material (so fresh it's in a Lightroom web gallery). See Additional New Work and his far more imaginative Impressions of Light.

Until a year a two ago, mySQL seemed to be the open source database to back, but barely a week goes by without SQLite popping up behind the scenes of some program I use - it powers both Aperture and Lightroom. Today's Guardian carries an interview with SQLite's creator:

It's very clear to me that if I'd had any business sense whatsoever I could have made a lot of money, but I don't. I like to tell people that we make enough to live fine in Charlotte, North Carolina. We don't make nearly enough money to live in London or San Francisco, but we don't live there so that's OK.

Ian Lyons has written a nice tutorial on locating missing files and folders in Lightroom. Most of all he points to a little-known detail - even when the targeted folder isn't missing, you can force the program to display the Locate Missing Folders command. This is invaluable when you use Explorer/Finder to move large numbers of files to a new drive. It's always best to copy the folders first, not move them. You can then force Lightroom to reset the folder paths, check there are no missing files in the new location, and then delete the files in the old location.

Also on Lightroom, Matthew Campagna at The Turning Gate is doing some excellent work creating new web templates. Adobe were, I'll put it gently, very adventurous with their choice of XML/XSLT for the templates, and I'm amazed that any real people have persevered with it as much as Matthew has.

At the Bluefire Blog, Micah Bowers, the designer of Lightroom's Flash galleries, shows a method for adding background sound. Wisely, he adds

Sound that automatically plays in websites is appropriate in some circumstances, and terribly annoying in others. This can be particularly true when you don?t offer volume controls or a mute button (which this movie does not have). So please be thoughtful about where and when to use this. When I have more time, I?ll make one with at least a mute button and post it.

Just like the warnings on fag packets (for American readers “fags” is English for cigarettes), somehow you know people will eagerly inflict their musical taste on unsuspecting visitors. At least Micah says he'll work on a version with a mute button. And bring on July 1st too.

In a long PhotoshopNews post Jeff Schewe describes the new controls available in Adobe Camera Raw 4.1. It's a nice appetizer for what's going to be in Lightroom 1.1.

I'm on the fence about the value of the Clarity slider, a wide area sharpening contrast adjustment. Apart from preferring the original name, “Punch”, I suspect it's going to be almost as overused as Fill Light or Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight. We'll see.

For me the most interesting features are the much-improved sharpening controls which, once they're in Lightroom, will further reduce the need to take pictures through Photoshop. I prefer his explanation here:

Detail
Adjusts how much high-frequency information is sharpened in the image and how much the sharpening process emphasizes edges. Lower settings primarily sharpen edges to remove blurring. Higher values are useful for making the textures in the image more pronounced.

Masking
Controls an edge mask. With a setting of zero, everything in the image receives the same amount of sharpening. With a setting of 100, sharpening is mostly restricted to those areas near the strongest edges. Press Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) while dragging this slider to see the areas to be sharpened (white) versus the areas masked out (black).

Gunar Penikis has posted a surprisingly-ugly but interesting example of using Flash for a Bridge panel:

Once loaded into the Bridge startup scripts folder, the BridgeExportToJPEG extension will demonstrate a Flash UI panel in Bridge that is functional in driving Bridge to create JPEGs and manipulate XMP metadata. All the thumbnails that are created in Bridge are JPEG based, so it is possible to export these thumbnails as JPEGs - for example if you want to create a JPEG catalog or quickly send JPEGs of your RAW files. I've also included the FLA file for tweaking. It's all available under a BSD license.

It would be great to see more Flash and Javascript developers build on the Bridge platform to develop their own features. Bridge also includes an HTML browser and HTTP and FTP services - so linking up to a web service can be accomplished. How about displaying GPS data in my photo as a Google/Yahoo map in Bridge?

I've actually had this little application for a while, and indeed it's interesting not for what it does but as an example of how people might expand Bridge's features.

I must admit to surprise at Bridge's improvement in CS3 (I quickly tired of Bridge 1) but I'm still not sure it has much of a place in my Lightroom / Photoshop / iView world. Lightroom has eclipsed it for editing, initial metadata entry and bulk adjustment, and iView for managing the archive, finding pictures, and generating web galleries. Bridge only really fits in as a component for reading and writing XMP metadata - for instance, I've a script to exchange iView Catalog Sets and custom fields and Lightroom hierarchical keywords. And that only makes me more irritated that Bridge CS3 is still hobbled by the introspective choice of JavaScript-only scripting - fine to integrate Adobe products but too messy for the big wide world.

But hey, learn Adobe Flash and Flash scripting too. Actually, that was something I planned to do. Then again, it has been so for the last 5 or 6 years, at least.

Via John Nack.

PHPture is an interesting plug in for Aperture which, if I understand correctly, uses a web server on your Mac and the PHP language to run a web site which looks like Aperture. It accesses Aperture's database and shows stacks, thumbnails, and a project listing, and makes your image versions available over a network or via the web.

Don't worry if you don't have Aperture or a Mac - once things settle down, it won't be long before such a thing is practical for Lightroom. It's possible already.

Via Micah Walter's Aperture Plugged In.

Here's a handy little registry hack which adds a “Send Folder to Lightroom” choice to Windows Explorer's right click menu. Either download and double click my registry file - read it first just to be sure - or copy this code into Notepad and save it as a file with an “reg” extension, then double click it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellLightroom]
@=”Send folder to Lightroom”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellLightroomcommand]
@=””C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Photoshop LightroomLightroom.exe” “%L””

You may have to edit the path if you installed Lightroom in another location. Here's also a similar registry file for Bridge CS3.

Update - a couple of people have pointed out that the original posting showed my Lightroom program folder was called Lightroom 1. I've now amended it to show the default installation folder.

I don't run Aperture seriously, more out of curiosity, but it's frustrating that metadata is stuck inside its library until you export the masters, duplicating your files. That is especially annoying because I often go through new pictures on the laptop while watching TV, like United's annihilation of Roma last night, and the same master files are often catalogued by Lightroom and iView. Why shouldn't I be able to add keywords or captions to files in Aperture, then read that metadata elsewhere?

A partial solution is Lightbox XMP, an Aperture export plug in that lets you export sidecar files. Currently you have to specify a single export folder - it really needs an option that outputs the sidecars in the same folders as the originals. And it should merge with existing sidecars. Rather like Lightroom does….

Via

Lightroom or iView for DAM? It's such a big question, an amorphous one too, and I've not had much spare time recently. But I spent a bit of time giving an answer and thought I'd add it here too. The devil is always in the detail of one's personal needs and right now I am not controlling my pictures with Lightroom and still rely on iView. After all LR is only a version 1, iView is more mature, and DAM is all about certainty.

If forced to rely on LR, I could just about do so. My view is that LR's glass is half full, not half empty, and the following “why iView not LR” comments should be read in that light.

iView's performance is fine. Specifically, I refer to the speed with which thumbnails become visible after changing to a certain folder, or keyword filtration. LR's performance on my main PC is well below what I think it should be on that machine (2.2 ghz P4 with 1 gb ram and 25g mb video card). I don't mind the time it spends building its previews, and can do something else, but thereafter I expect the app's scrolling speed to match programs like iView. And I'm just not getting it.

I need to manage a wider range of file types than LR accepts. It would be OK if I simply wanted to manage photograph file formats, but for my writing I also have png files (screengrabs off the Mac) and Word documents. I'm not into video or audio, but LR is only intended to manage a photograph-only workflow.

But within a photograph-only workflow, there are other file type limitations that may be relevant. LR doesn't import images that are over 10000 pixels in any direction - not normally an issue, but a problem if you shoot panoramas. Photoshop CS3 is very much better at stitching and I can see that I won't be the only one to do more of this type of stuff. The Photoshop team have shot the LR team in its foot….

LR will not write metadata into raw files. That is Adobe's stance, but I see no problem writing directly into working raw files IF you are wise enough to keep virgin backups too. It's my call, and I like that iView sees it that way.

With iView I see my Nikon raw file's preview, while with LR I see Adobe's interpretation of it. In general, this is no bad thing because you often shoot to capture all the highlights for example, not to make the camera-generated preview equate to the finished article, and I do like to see my raw adjusted version of the image (some people like a Nikon Capture and iView combination for this reason). But it's not so welcome when you've done things like use your camera's b&w setting - in iView I see the preview in b&w, while LR shows Adobe's colour rendition of the raw data. While I accept LR can't get at Nikon's secret sauce, it can and does display that mono preview and so it should be able to store it. Now I only use the mode to get rid of IR captures' purplish cast, and as a b&w man I've always shot on the assumption that the negative or digital file isn't the finished article. But if you believe you get your shots absolutely right in camera (eg WB, sharpening etc) then you would get value from being able to compare the camera-generated previews.

I prefer iView's catalog sets, custom fields and people fields, to LR's collections. One can just about replicate the functionality, so my objection is more to the immaturity of the interface. For example, I hate how when I add a collection in LR, the database filters down to that collection. So imagine I'm using a collection for a wedding or vacation, and dividing it up into phases or themes, each time I add a new subcollection I then have to go back to the main one. It's the same with keywords - add a new one in the left panel and the whole database filters down to it.

I could go into lots of other details, but I'd be going too much into my own needs. You know what you need. Both products have free trials, so I wouldn't listen to me!

Not sure when he wrote this, other than in the last 6 months, but Robert Edwards looks at Aperture or Lightroom = Neither:

I'm not suggesting there isn't a use or market for Aperture and Lightroom. Certainly their sales figures suggest otherwise. What I am stating is neither Aperture or Lightroom is the panacea digital photographers want them to be. At present no single application is going to successfully do it all for you. There is no Swiss Army Knife software for photographers. By the way have you ever tried using a Swiss Army Knife in preference of a real tool?

A suppository from Down Under?

After being rather too sceptical at first, I’ve been trying LightZone 2 and looking at its touted integration with Lightroom. I was going to make a longer posting but instead there is now a good article at Outback Photo on Lightroom and LightZone in Tandem.

While I now think the integration is a little more than hype, I don’t see any real place for LightZone when someone has the full version of Photoshop. Elements maybe. And LightZone still has a real problem with metadata. Let’s say you send a DNG file to LightZone. The TIF file begins its life with XMP data from a variety of sources such as Lightroom or iView. When LightZone saves the file, old style IPTC-IIM fields like description or copyright are still present and populated, but data in XMP fields is gone. So goodbye to any iView information like catalog sets or people, or any thing you may have added through a custom File Info panel in Bridge. More relevant to Lightroom, any Lightroom adjustment settings are gone from the file. It’s inexcusable that applications like Aperture and LightZone, both written long after IPTC-XMP’s introduction, fail to read it or strip it from your derivative files.

Someone, who knew my opinion on the issue, sent me this spoof on Geek Culture's cartoon about Creative Suite 3's many versions. If Lightroom customers want it, so too do Photoshop users.

In this post I wrote about using Lightroom's Collections to record virtual copies or versions. My thinking has changed a little since I wrote that piece, though I do still use Collections, and the key point remains that you must mark the virtual copies immediately after they are created and while LR still has them selected. Otherwise you've a big problem if you're a heavy shooter with versioning requirements.

Where you mark the virtual copies is more open to personal choice, and there's a problem if you use more than one computer - Collections aren't included in the XMP data, so you can't easily move your work across. Then again, neither is any data relating to Virtual Copies. But portability aside, Collections do have organisational benefits in that you can for example set up a Collection for a wedding shoot and then gather sub Collections for its b&w or other aspects of the job, and connect them to slideshow or web presets (Collections remember the last presets applied to them).

You could use keywords, and it's great that LR lets you keep them private. But I'm not keen in principle on abusing keywords and the downside of being private is that they aren't in the XMP for a multi computer setup (and in any case there is that stumbling block of Virtual Copies being stranded). Someone on Adobe's forum suggested using the Instructions field, and that's pretty well what I'm now doing - as well as using Collections. So I put in the Instructions something like “VC black and whites” - I can then use Find to target the field.

These are inconvenient workarounds however, and this area needs development work, so I hope Adobe will make things easier very soon. If you forget to mark the virtual copies, your only hope is if you can still sort by Edit Time - otherwise you're into manually selecting those 20 or 200 virtuals - you've about as much hope as my 8 or 9 year old classmates who chose City when some of us chose United.

Aperture manages versions better, adding a suffix to the virtual copy's name and letting you select them via “smart albums”. These let you define collections or “albums” to target the version name - eg “shots on 4/3/07 with version name including b&w”. Lightroom urgently needs smart collections, and version names that can be targeted. Here the Aperture smart album is looking for images shot over a certain date range, when I was in Rome, including the word “marmi” as in Stadio dei Marmi, and looking for the “B&W” version. Ignore Stack Groupings mkes the search look inside any stacks.

James Duncan Davidson discusses the extension of the Photoshop brand into an online service and then turns on its addition to “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom”:

The only people who will be impressed by the Photoshop brand being applied to Lightroom or an online-based photo tool are the very people who don't know what any of it means anyway. And when those users get more sophisticated, they'll learn that it's a layer of indirection that seems pretty silly. It's like Johnson & Johnson marketing toothpaste as “Band-Aid brand tooth cleaner”.

He has a point - Lightroom shares very little with Photoshop. But you've also got to accept people know the word Photoshop in a way they don't recognize Adobe. It was no use telling friends I was writing a book on the new program from Adobe - if they knew the name at all, it was because of PDF files. Tell them it was from the people who make Photoshop, and their eyes lit up, briefly.

O'Reilly's Lightroom vs Aperture has some interesting articles and even more interesting threads such as this discussion of Aperture's flexibility vs Lightroom's modularity. While I prefer a palette-based interface, as in Aperture, I don't think Lightroom's modular approach slows me down, and one commenter put it really well:

I'm still confused as to why modularity is a problem. To me, Aperture seems to be great for someone with a short attention span. Let me explain…

In LR, I use the Library to determine which images from the last batch of photos I wish to keep. I keyword them, tag them and rate them. I then switch to the LR Develop mode and begin tweaking my images. I start with the highest rated and work my way down. Therefore, if some of the higher rated images capture the scene better, I don't have to mess with the lesser images which may require more correction. Seems fine to me.

Now Aperture seems strange doing the same thing. I find myself sorting my images, adding keywords and then thinking hmm… what happens if I make this adjustment, or that adjustment. Meanwhile, I've stopped sorting images and started playing with them. LR eliminates this temptation and forces me to make critical decisions where they need to be made.