Pablo Averbuj

Photoshop Album and Lightroom

A posting on Sree Kotay‘s blog alerted me to a product I had never heard of: Adobe Lightroom, and look!, a free beta. I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop Album (aka, PSA) for years now and it’s nice and all, but noticeably outdated and semi-abandoned. I watched the video on their site and decided that it was something that really appealed to me. It’s fairly slick and a little clumsy on my desktop. I only imported 6 images into it and it was using 250mb of memory (finally, a worthy memory hog worthy of competing with Firefox!). It is beta so maybe the memory footprint will shrink, but I really like it so far. One thing that appeals to me is that it doesn’t modify the underlying image. It *feels* like when you make a modification it applies it as a filter over the original image (non-destructive editing). I actually don’t mind PSA’s way of doing this; it makes a copy of the image called IMAGENAME_edited.jpg, but the Lightroom way seems to have some advantages. The in-program editing is really good, mostly obviating the need to take it into GIMP or Photoshop to do edits.

One feature that’s missing is importing from PSA (or heck, *anything*). I checked the feature request forum and fortunately I’m not the only heavy PSA user, there are many clamoring for an import feature. The most important data is the tags/labels associated with the images. This got me worried: was I stuck with PSA? Would the Anna graduate highschool while I’m still using software from 2002 to catalog her pictures? I started to search to see if I anyone had bothered to import PSA catalogs into their software. Along the way I found sweet relief. The PSA catalog is merely an MS Access database! Just to confirm, I made a copy of my catalog named test.mdb, and it opened right up in Access. Whew, dodged a bullet. I’ll just need to figure out how to get the data into Lightroom, and at first glance, not sure how easy that will be.