For some people this is a tiny feature, but I’ve always been a supporter of Lightroom being able to catalogue all types of files, so I welcome Lightroom 5’s ability to catalogue PNG files.

Lightroom is supposed to help manage the workflow from shoot to delivery, so it should be the photographer who decides what types of files are part of photographic projects. After all, while a project will be centred on photography, it can often contain files created in Microsoft Office, PDFs and InDesign files etc. It’s simply a waste of energy, and confusing, to be unable to use a single program to manage all these files.

Sadly arbitrary limits remain in Lightroom 5, but video cataloguing arrived in version 4, and we now have PNG files too.

Progress, one file type at a time.