Marc Rochkind doesn't need his Wikipedia entry to show he's clearly a very smart guy. Not only is he developing ImageIngester, a sophisticated flash card downloader that backs up, verifies, adds metadata and logs the whole process, he's also figured out the Lightroom database structure:

For your reading pleasure, here's the output of the SQLite3 “.schema” command:

CREATE TABLE Adobe_AdditionalMetadata (
id_local INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
id_global UNIQUE NOT NULL,
image INTEGER,….

I'll spare you any more of this script, and it's interesting enough for us pointy heads to imagine some of the program's future directions (after all, it is being developed dynamically - my way of saying they're making it up as they go along).

But the real point of Marc's revelation is this: as things stand, users will be able to automate all sorts of Lightroom tasks by writing directly to the database. For example, the program currently lacks the ability to do what iView calls Find Missing Files, but it would be relatively easy for a script to check that files are where the Lightroom database thinks they are. Equally, if you move files to a new drive, it would be possible to do the equivalent of iView's Reset Paths, updating the Lightroom database. We just have to keep our fingers crossed Adobe don't lock up the database