I've never used the word “cool” in the American sense. I remember hearing it as a teenager, but then 1976 and punk reached Bolton and swept away all such hippy Americanisms along with all the rock dinosaurs (for some reason it's always Rush who spring to mind) we'd previously admired as the height of musical dexterity. I don't recall hearing the word again until my first business trip to Dayton Ohio in the mid 1990s and at the time I put it down to being in the backwoods with pickup trucks everywhere, the odd Confederate flag, and no doubt with Rush on the stereo. Much as “cool” is now commonplace again in British usage, it's still a word I don't think my age group could use, Still, it is on the borderline of acceptability, while firmly on the wrong side lie “hot” or “awesome” or “killer”….

Whether or not I find that sort of language foreign or juvenile, or both, it's not me, is it? Much as I might enthuse about Lightroom 2's most obvious new features, such as non-destructive dodging and burning and gradient tools, I could never call them “awesome”, superb though they are. So more like the Housemartins, whose hype was to call themselves the 4th best band in Hull, here is the first of my “not quite famous enough 5” - Keywords are metadata again!

I never liked how Lightroom 1 treated keywords as if they weren't metadata like any other descriptive metadata. After all, if you photograph the same subject more than once, there's a fair chance those pictures will share the same title, caption, locations, and many if not all of the same keywords. Bridge metadata templates let you apply all that information in one fell swoop, but in Lightroom 1 keywords were excluded from its Metadata Presets. And if you wanted to copy metadata from one image to another, Sync Metadata also failed to copy the keywords. You were back to cut and paste.

But next time you cut and paste keywords from one picture to another, take a quick look at Metadata Presets and Sync Metadata. They now include keywords too. Isn't that awesome? Hm - not quite me. Bravo!