Pablo Averbuj

Lightroom Follow-Up

This is probably the first time I’ve ever posted twice in one day, so I think my excitement about Lightroom shows. In the introductory video on the Adobe Labs site the demonstrator mentions that Lightroom’s backend is a relational database, I figured (based on the PSA history) that he was referring to MS Access. Then as I was digging around reading release notes, at the bottom there is a copyright notice for SQLite. So I downloaded the SQLite command line utility and sure enough the “preferences” files are SQLite databases. Here’s a screenshot of me doing some joins to get the image < -> tag relationships.

There is also a copyright notice for Lua in the release notes. It’s really encouraging to see large companies starting to take advantage of open source/public domain software in their commercial products. As a company they win by saving development time and using tested software. As a user I win because I (theoretically) get the software cheaper as a result and I’m not locked in.