To add to the ever increasing arsenal of gadgets to never leave at home, comes the BT-1000P GPS Logger.

Having recently purchased the unit, especially for the purpose tagging all the photos for an upcoming trip, I flew away extremely happy, Read more »

It seems that Apple left one thing out of the equation for Safari 3.1 – colour adherence. With my new Dell 2408WFP, I was getting quite stroppy – as no matter how many times I would calibrate it – it would continually not show the correct colours as compared to my MacBook Pro screen [matte] – or so it seemed. I initially posted two photos on DPreview hoping to ascertain some unknown out of the crown. Here is the MacBook Pro screen with the ‘correct’ colour. Read more »

Ever wanted to hide the left+right pane’s within Lightroom without having either custom defined shortcuts, or modifying OS X keyboard preferences to enable function keys? Read more »

The feature-set within Lightroom’s newly released 1.2 ‘update’ – should have really been a mere patch or a service pack, and carried the 1.1.1 designation – as that’s all it really is.

Lets have a look at some of the main new updates/fixes [complete list available over at Adobe]:

XMP bug – where Lightroom, upon having the “Automatically Update XMP metadata” setting – would run like a dog and simply become un-useable.
1:1 previews – Lightroom used to ‘ignore’ your request to disgard any full previews after a specific time-frame. I ended up [and I'm sure so have others] with over 5GB of ‘previews’ – which were supposed to be discarded on a daily basis.
Metadata Panel – If you’re a Windows user, you would have noticed intermittent display problems when trying to drop down the Metadata Panel.

As shown by the above, this is merely a fix-pack, and nothing else. Which is unfortunate given the feature-set brought along by the initial 1.1 update.
This tells us that either Lightroom was released as a Beta in V1.0′s clothes, and the real deal was provided in the form of 1.1 release.

Given the above performance, we shouldn’t be seeing any more updates for another 6 months. After which 2.0 will hopefully be released encompassing what I find missing in Lightroom:

• Dual monitor support – common guys [and girls], you can have detachable panels in Photoshop – and not in Photoshop Lightroom.
• Export Watermark embedding – what is available now on ‘Export’ – is a joke. There are workarounds, such as droplets in Photoshop; yet they either are too time consuming – or simply take too much time. Lightroom is about simplifying the photographers workflow, so give us a customizeable export tool.
• Smart Collections – I just wanted to look for all photos that I haven’t added any keywords to, and then thought I’d save that search for another day – guess what – you can’t! Lightroom doesn’t support smart collections of any kind. A quick look in google, revealed it’s a well known problem/limitation with Lightroom. Fingers crossed this will be addressed in the next version.

Many souls weren’t happy that Adobe didn’t support Canon’s 40D when they got it, in ACR and consequently in Lightroom.

Now you can jump for joy – as right now ACR supports 40D

Also note that on the page it lists Lightroom 1.2 as available also, yet this has been reportedly false. which is available for download over at Adobe

Cameras these days record the orientation of the camera when you take a shot, and write this into EXIF which is embedded into the photo. There seems to be a new way in which the 40D does it.

If anyone has attempted to import from 40D into Lightroom, they might notice that all the images are rotated 180%.

Windows picks up the correct way up, yet Lightroom simply doesn’t.

I hope Adobe will be quick to remedy this problem, as well as update the RAW converter to accommodate the 40D

Update

Having a further look into it – I noticed this only occurs when you connect the camera directly to the computer, as opposed to extract the CF, and using it within a reader.

Also windows didn’t automatically rotate the photos when looking at them through explorer, so possibly this is a Windows Vista problem, and not Lightroom.

If anyone in XP or OSX can reproduce this – do post.

Update 2

After trying this with Lightroom 1.3 – the issue still persists.

Not fixed yet.

After I updated Lightroom to 1.1, I had mixed reaction. At first I was very pleased with the added features such as spraying meta tags onto photos. Although I was very unhappy with the fact that the update rendered my Lightroom, simply unworkable – it was way too slow.

• The browsing of photos would stagger once you go from one end of the library to the other
• Previewing of photos was nearly impossible at full resolution, as it would just sit the with the infamous ‘Loading’ bar at the bottom

I’m using this on my laptop [Core Duo T60 2500, with 1.5GB RAM] – and with nearly 5000 photos, Lightroom 1.0 screamed through any task. You’d imagine that 1.1 would be an improvement.

I was convinced it wasn’t only my problem, even after numerous posts on DPreview, Adobe’s Lightroom Forums – everyone who had a MUCH better machine to play with – reported no problem.

The good news is that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and you can get your speed back.

Two methods [both covered]

1. Optimize the catalog – doesn’t work for everyone, namely myself.
2. Re-export your catalog, and let Lightroom rebuild

1. File -> Catalog Settings…
2. Under the General tab – click ‘Relaunch and Optimize’ | for a lot of people, this will do the trick, otherwise continue
3. After Lightroom opens back up:
   1. Under Library foldout on the left, select ‘All Photographs’, to make sure your whole library catalog is being exported.
   2. File -> Export as Catalog
4. Pick a new directory not far from where your current Lightroom library exists, this will save you time later on moving it.
5. NOTE: When the dialog opens up, make sure you don’t have ‘Export negative files’ selected, otherwise depending on how many photos you have, it will take a VERY long time, plus it is completely unnecessary
   
6. Click ‘Save’
7. Once it has finished exporting the library, the previews and is ‘done’, go and run the new library – you should notice a MUCH snappier response on all actions, and it is now as Lightroom 1.1 should have been.