Lightroom 2 up and running
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008
I’ve got Lightroom 2 downloaded and installed and it’s working quite well. I read that a few found it slower than version 1.4 but I wasn’t sure what type of computers they were using. On my 2.5 Ghz MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of memory it seems plenty fast, much faster, in fact, than 1.4 was.
This is just to say that I bought it, downloaded it, installed it, and imported my 1.4 library without a hitch. I did back up my entire computer before doing this but I’m pretty sure I won’t be going back to version 1.4 for anything.
You beat me to it! ;)
I take the risk without the backup and I installed too. I have the same configuration, macbook pro 2.5ghz 4gb ram… and yes, much faster. :)
Ah! Interesting!
I think I will probably upgrade today Richard. I really want the box (you know me), but may just download it.
Best,
Jon
Bought and installed, no hitches :-)
Will report back findings – I have a wedding to process in the next couple of days so will give it a good work out!
Gary: Hey, I’m not about to let some back woods, Oregon librarian beat me out on an upgrade to an app I told him about. Sheesh. Actually, I went ahead because I hadn’t heard anything from any of the reviewers about liabilities at all, not a single word. Just one user on flickr talked of a slower experience and I’m not sure if he was a Mac or PC user.
Cybergus: Great, glad you had the same experience as me. I must say, however, that I wish their download and install UI/experience was as clean as other Macintosh applications. There are so many vestiges of the Windows world in the experience it irks me.
Jon: Good man, keep the US economy rolling. We need all the UK pounds we can get to offset our falling dollar.
Other than the reports of slowness, there have been reports of issues with keywords not always exporting from a 1.x catalog into a new 2.0 catalog. Details, and comments from folks at Adobe, can be found in the Adobe forums.
Brooks, thanks. I just looked and all of my keywords came through okay. Whew!
I had the keyword bug in my upgrade. It’s not horrible… the keywords are still there, the option to export them in my JPGs has just been turned off for each keyword. Luckily I didn’t have all that many. It only took about 20 minutes of tediously clicking on each word and turing the option back on.
Paul, well, I spoke too soon, mine are missing the export checkbox too but I noticed that they’re messed up in other ways and that’s not from upgrading, it’s from me not taking care of them. Sigh, I have work to do now but it’s all good and in the process I’ll get things cleaned up. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
By the way, I noticed that you’re moving from a pixelpost driven photo site to a wordpress/kiss site. Very nice, looks great. How easily does Kiss handle importing and thumbnail creation? I’ve never liked the various wp photoblog theme admin UIs as well as the pixelpost admin UI although I am a wordpress user… I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.
hello! I testing to trial version, thinkig to buy it, also Richard maybe you read some book about lightroom? I browse amazon and want to buy some one to learn.
Gedas: No, I don’t have any lightroom books, I prefer to use trial and error and the web and the built in help.
I just spent an hour cleaning up my keywords and made a bunch of smart collections (like I have in iPhoto( and so far things are working fine.
You know iPhoto, don’t get a book yet just, just build a collection much like you do in iPhoto.
The cool thing is you can us EXIF info for building a smart collection, not just keywords. I made a Macro smart collection that has 100mm and 180mm (I had it for a while) as criteria and it pulls in all of my macros perfectly. I suppose one might include images taken with other lenses as macros but I do most of my real macro work with my 100mm macro lens so it really does work.
Just play around with it Gedas, you’re a serious Mac user so this stuff will come easily.
this means you don’t use Iphoto? I think I do double job, always I transfer my photos to iPhoto, then if I want edit them I importing one by one in Lightroom. I think you right I need play it around, create collection , edit it all in one place.
And what you thinking about Aperture, you never come back where your start ?
Gedas: I don’t use iPhoto for anything but snapshots anymore. Anything shot in RAW or semi-serious it goes directly into Lightroom.
I moved from Aperture to Lightroom a while ago. If you remember, I posted about it. I’m still quite happy with Lightroom and have almost completely exported all the work I did in Aperture to Lightroom. Once that’s done I’ll get Aperture off my hard disk.
iPhoto is still useful for things that I care a bit less about editing so I continue to use and like it, but, not in conjunction with Lightroom, only in parallel to it. That’s just me, you can do all of this any way you like.
Remember, unlike Photoshop, Lightroom is both an editor and an organizer taking the place of iPhoto.
huh, it’s big job move all photos from iPhoto to Lightroom. It’s really big job I have about ten thousand photos I need all of them create collections, maybe I finish next year.
Gedas: You don’t need to move photos you’ve already processed, printed, posted, and are finished with. You should just start importing new RAW images into LR and go from there. As you learn the tools you can export RAWs from iPhoto and redo them in LR. No rush, as you learn LR.
Richard, Thanks I’m glad you like my site.
Pixelpost is nice because it’s meant to do just one thing… photoblog. I used it for a while and I liked it.
I switched to WordPress for 2 reasons… The first is I wanted to post other types of content. I’m not sure about now, but at the time Pixelpost just couldn’t do that. The second is I wanted to move away from the, 1 image at a time, model of photoblogging. I wanted it structured more like a traditional blog (multiple posts per page). I was already familiar with WordPress, so it seemed like a good way to go.
The Kiss theme I’m using is actually incredibly old. It was made for WordPress 1.5, so it’s sadly out of date. I’ve heavily modified it, but it’s still not up to speed with all of the new image handling capabilities built into newer versions of WordPress.
I think WordPress is an incredible platform, but I actually don’t take advantage of much of what it offers (in terms of images). I use MarsEdit to write my posts, and my image uploading is a very manual process. I don’t use the uploader in MarsEdit or WordPress. I just ftp them to the server and write in the necessary bits in my post. The way I do it is more work than most people would like, but it works for me.
Sorry I’m not being too much help here. I will say that given the choice between Pixelpost and WordPress, I would always recommend WordPress. It’s just so much more powerful and flexible, with a strong development community behind it. For photoblogging, you may not be able to get what you want right out of the box, but with a little time and effort it can do just about anything.
Paul: Thanks for the great feedback. I certainly agree on wordpress being the more mature platform with more features, better coding and a larger support community. However, what is great about PixelPost is how easy it is to set up a photoblog quickly and post pictures. WordPress doesn’t touch PP in that area. For what you want, a full service blog, WP is the answer but for anyone wanting a quick and easy photoblog I still think Pixelpost is a good alternative.
By the way, I too have legacy issues with this theme, which was built by an excellent coder for WP 1.5 and then heavily modified by me. I need to either start again with the default theme and start modifying or completely gut this one so as to get the features out that I’m not using. I’ll get around to it at some point, after I’ve done everything else I’m backed up on.