Reviews of Lightroom (Adobe)

Lightroom 1.0:

Pros:- intuitive interface
- really very fast usage after few hours of work
- 50.000 pictures no problem on normal PC
-quick and comfortable workflow for basic bust most needed operations, fair ingetration to Phtoshop & Co. for more functionality
- flexible and easy manageable hierarchical keywords and virtual folders

Cons:-no dual monitor support
-no cooperation in this version (concept of separated databases)
-no Plug-Ins
-single-user tool, neither network nor group support
-exports, Priontouts, generated Webs etc. ( products) are not durable database assets
- no real support for of-site saved pictures (e.g. DVD)

We were all hoping that this product would not follow the antiquated convoluted interface designs that Adobe in infamous for. Our hopes failed !

True to Adobe style, or lack thereof, the very first step in the Getting Started, User Guide (that horizontally arranged pdf that\'s impossible to read) is a dud: \"1. Look at your file handling options in the menu at the top of the Import Photos dialog box. Four choices appear.\" What? None of us could figure out what \"handling options\", so we selected import, and attempted to import a jpg. The program crashed.

From what I read on the forums, the program is a disaster!

In my 30-year career developing computer applications, I consider LightRoom to have one of the poorest, totally non-intuitive interfaces. It\'s the first program in decades that I even had to look at a manual to get started ... and even the manual could not help me there. Call support? What support? They don\'t do that anymore. I can see at a glance that this app, if it ever get fixed so that it want crash every three seconds, will require hours and hours in the manual ... provided that Adobe ever provides a manual that is accurate.

My main complaint is that everyone was expecting, hoping, and needing an application for managing large volumes of images and metatdata. But from but it appears that LightRoom is merely a scaled-down PhotoShop with a lot of frivolous slide shows and low-end and clunky editing. And, following the trend of other DOS-age Adobe apps, it\'s an incredible memory and CPU resource hog to boot.

The program that is needed is one for mass management of images, with sophisticated metadata and database management, query capabilities, drag-n-drop simplicity, and running over the MySQL core. Someone forgot to tell Adobe\'s aged programmers that we can store imagery and any type of data in a relational database now !