[Leica] taking the Lightroom plunge

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

I've been experimenting with Lightroom for months and months, and reading 
documentation about it, and watching the Lynda.com training videos, and then 
experimenting some more.

Today I finally took the plunge and began the batch import (and conversion 
to 
DNG) of most of the personal photos that I have in digital form. That's 
29107 
images. It seems to be importing them at the rate of about 600 per hour, so 
it's going to take a couple of days to finish. I have a couple thousand 
images stuck inside iPhoto that I don't seem to be able to import directly 
into Lightroom that I haven't tried to tackle yet.

I was very dubious about Lightroom when it first arrived because it seemed 
to 
want to suck my photos into a proprietary database from which I could not 
extract them without using the Lightroom software itself. That is a lock-in 
I'm unwilling to accept. I've slowly figured out how to get around each one 
of my issues with Lightroom, and I've developed a workflow that will protect 
me against catastrophic loss.

I'll keep you posted. And I still have a FireWire disk that has all of my 
pictures as they existed pre-Lightroom; it is going into my safe deposit box.

Brian Reid