[Leica] musings on Lightroom

[jhnichols at bellsouth.net (Jim Nichols)]

Brian,

You are much bolder than I.  I gave up on Lightroom early on because of some 
of the same complaints.

Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian Reid" <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
To: <LUG@leica-users.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2007 12:51 PM
Subject: [Leica] musings on Lightroom


> I've been using Lightroom for a couple of months now, and I have 26,000 
> images in it. I thought I'd file a few comments. The bottom line is that I 
> think I'm going to keep using it, though every day I find myself 
> frustrated by it. The things that it does well outweigh the things that it 
> does poorly or not at all.
>
> I've used Photoshop for 15 years, probably as long as it has existed, and 
> it is my gold standard of what an image editing program should do. But 
> Photoshop doesn't have any image management features, so I was using 
> Bridge for that. Bridge can still do a few things that Lightroom can't, 
> and those things are very important to me, so I find myself exiting 
> Lightroom for Bridge several times a day. For 2 months now I've been 
> forcing myself to use Lightroom instead of Photoshop/Bridge to deal with 
> my images, so I've learned how to live with it.
>
> The one thing that I wish someone had told me about Lightroom when I was 
> getting started is that it is *asynchronous*. I'll say it again: Lightroom 
> is Asynchronous. This is both really good and really awful.
>
> What it means for a program to be asynchronous is that there is no direct 
> link between what you ask it to do and what you see on the screen that it 
> is doing. For example, if you ask it to delete 20 images, it will accept 
> your command and come back for more commands and then it will start 
> deleting the 20 images. While you are doing something else, those 20 
> images will vanish one by one and eventually they will all be gone. But 
> you don't get to see cause and effect, the cause being you asking for the 
> images to be deleted and the effect being them disappearing from your 
> screen.
>
> This is really useful if you are an expert user of a program, but 
> unbelievably terrible if you are learning how to use the program. Imagine 
> you are sitting there with your Lightroom manual reading about how to use 
> hierarchical keywords and you want to try it out. The manual is, like all 
> modern manuals, terrible, and it doesn't tell you whether the hierarchy 
> goes from left to right or right to left. So if you want to assign a 
> keyword Animals:Mammals:Horses to a picture, you don't know whether your 
> should say Animals > Mammals > Horses or Horses > Mammals > Animals or 
> Horses < Mammals < Animals, so you try it to see what happens. 
> Experimenting is the right way to learn things, eh?
>
> Well, if you assign "Animals > Mammals > Horses" as a keyword, there is a 
> delay of some number of seconds before the keyword assignment actually 
> happens. This is because the program is asynchronous, and it will do the 
> processing when it can, and you don't have to wait for it. There is 
> nothing that tells you how long you have to wait to see what (if anything) 
> has happened when you do a command, so you can never be certain that you 
> have done a proper experiment. This lack of certainty makes you want to 
> smash things after just a few minutes. After a few days of 
> experimentation, I eventually figured out that the programmers who 
> implemented Lightroom didn't know the answer to this question any better 
> than I did, and sometimes they list hierarchies from left to right and 
> other times they list them from right to left and yet other times they 
> forget to list them at all. This is why I'm using hierarchical keywords as 
> an example: it's something that was implemented badly in Lightroom, and 
> the asynchronous nature of the UI made it really hard for me to figure out 
> by experimentation that there is no good answer for my quest. I still 
> haven't finished figuring out why sometimes a keyword that I enter as 
> "Family > MacKays > Katherine" will show up as "Katherine" and sometimes 
> as the full hierarchy, and if I enter her brother Robert in the same 
> window, it will show up differently. This falls into the category of "the 
> programmer was hung over", but usually I can succeed in figuring out what 
> the program actually does. The asynchronous nature of Lightroom has 
> prevented me from doing the detailed experiments I would need to do to 
> figure out all of this undocumented and incorrect stuff that I need to do 
> despite its being undocumented and incorrect.
>
> The second thing I've learned about Lightroom is that it's too damn 
> tentative. It reminds me of the Dobby the House Elf character in the Harry 
> Potter books. It keeps telling me things that lead me to believe that it 
> thinks it will fail and would I like it to take this or that precaution. 
> But since it's asynchronous, I can never tell when it has reached a stable 
> point.
>
> What brought this home for me is that this morning I noticed that my 
> Retrospect server had run out of disk space, and I started analyzing where 
> the space had gone. I realized that there were 6 copies of all of my 
> 26,000 photographs on backup servers, 3 on the Retrospect server and 3 on 
> the Time Machine server. Time Machine knew how to take evasive action when 
> it ran out of space, but Retrospect didn't. The various copies of the 
> pictures were made at different times by different Lightroom actions, but 
> what they all had in common was that Lightroom had asked me a question "do 
> you want to make a backup copy of this?" and I figured that if a program 
> was so unsure of itself that it was asking me that question, I'd better 
> say yes.
>
> Now that I'm a more experienced user of Lightroom I realize that I really 
> only need to back up the catalog and not make 2 extra copies of all of the 
> images, but that wasn't immediately obvious when I was starting out. I 
> have two separate backup servers (Retrospect and Time Machine), and I 
> don't need Lightroom to join that party, too.
>
> So right after lunch I'm going to delete all of my Lightroom-generated 
> backup copies of all 26,000 of my images, but leave the Lightroom catalog 
> backups alone. Then I'm going to make a new full backup with Retrospect, 
> which should free up the 600GB of wasted space that those backup copies 
> are occupying there. Then I'll probably buy Lightroom a pair of shoes, 
> since when you give a House Elf an article of clothing it becomes free and 
> no longer needs to snivel.
>
> Lightroom DESPERATELY needs to learn how to do what Bridge's "Filter" 
> panel can do, which is to give me a breakdown of the metadata aspects of 
> the selected images. Wade Heninger gave me some impossibly complicated 
> sequence of actions in Lightroom that can supposedly trick it into 
> emulating the Bridge Filter, but I never got it to work and it's easier 
> just to exit Lightroom, launch Bridge, and have a look.
>
> Brian Reid
>
>
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