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Lightroom 2: The Digital Asset Management Tool
For a number of years I have been looking for a complete Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool. A DAM tool is a piece of software that helps download, rename, backup, rate, group, catalog, filter, archive and keep track of all my digital images which may be scattered across several hard drives. A DAM will also aid in creating image submissions for clients without me having to chase down all those images individually. In the last several years there have been two well known pieces of DAM software. Those are iView Media Pro (now Microsoft's Expression media 2) and Extensis Portfolio. Apple's Aperture was also a potential candidate but it was so slow that it didn't take long for me to dismiss it as a contender. I tried iView and while it worked well I wasn't enthralled. I have heard good things about Extensis Portfolio but I never gave it a try. I was hoping Adobe Lightroom would step in and become the end all be all of digital asset management. Well, hold onto your hat, Lightroom version 2 is now a real world working digital asset management tool!
When Lightroom was announced earlier this week and even during the beta testing process over the last year or so I never heard anybody discuss this issue or talk about this as a feature of Lightroom 2. Previous versions of Lightroom choked with more than 10,000 high resolution raw images in a single catalog. That was the reason I had individual catalogs for each shoot. But now that Lightroom 2 can seemingly handle any number of images it is a much more useful and versatile piece of software. I have a feeling 64-bit processing is a big part of this new development.
It is rare that I get excited about software but I have to say this feature is the most exciting aspect of Lightroom 2 over and above any other feature bar none for my workflow. Now that I can import all of my digital files into one catalog solves a lot of issues I had to work around in my previous workflow. My workflow has changed quite a bit as a result of this improvement to Lightroom. Gone are the days of having to chase down individual Lightroom catalogs. Gone are the days of having to look for images according to folder and file names. I'll just do a search with Lightroom's phenomenal new filter tool. And now that the Web module includes output sharpening I can filter images, make a collection and submit web galleries to clients all within the same program. It's beautiful!
As you can see at right, I have over 30,000 high resolution raw images in my Lightroom catalog right now. My catalog file size is 50.53 MB and that includes the standard previews. Another beautiful thing with Lightroom is that the image previews travel with the catalog. Hence, if I copy that catalog to a pocket hard drive and open it up on my laptop I still have access to all of the image previews so that I can submit images when I am out of the office. Or if I unplug some hard drives I will still have access to those images and their location if I need to access them again.
Lightroom is now a full meal deal that fulfills pretty much all the needs of a professional photographer save for advanced image manipulation and compositing in Photoshop. And since Lightroom and Photoshop work together seamlessly Lightroom just became the biggest dog on the block - not that it wasn't already. So jump in. The water is nice and cool here in Lightroom-land.
This by the way is an excerpt from my 122-page workflow eBook using Lightroom 2.0, entitled Adobe Photoshop Lightroom:A Professional Photographer's Workflow. The new version of the eBook should be out in the next few days. At this point it is ready to go, I just have to do a final edit which shouldn't take too long. If you'd like to check it out click here.
That's it for this week. See you next week here at Inside Lightroom.
Adios, Michael Clark
Yes, that's a feature that impressed me most as well! A second one is the gradient tool, for nice bleu sky's or when the sun is in one side of the picture making it all too bright on that side. One thing I still miss in LR2 is the possibility of cropping to a specified number of pixels for in my blurb photobooks.
How did you get a catalog size of only 50mb for 30k images. I have a 176mb catalog for less than 7k images. Not a lot of virtual copies and less than 200 keywords.
Dan
Dan -
In my catalog I only made 1:1 previews for the images I was working on - the rest of the images only have standard sized previews and my preferences for those are set to 1680 pixels wide, high quality previews and my 1:1 previews are discarded after 30 days.
If you have 7k images all with 1:1 previews then yes it could be 176 MB catalog no problem. If I made 1:1 previews for all of my images it would be a huge catalog!
So if I need to rework some older images I can go in and create the 1:1 previews for those images on the fly...hope this makes sense.
Cheers, Michael
As for changing an image size for a Blurb book, I do notice that you can chose the approriate aspect ratio in the develop crop section and then export to a specific pixel count in the export dialog box and you will get excatly what you are looking for. Just a two step process.
Personally, I just love the new tweeks on the slide show. It's nice that I can build slide shows so much faster than I used to. I'm often running a slide show at the last second.
Lightroom is not quite a complete digital asset management tool like Microsoft Expression. Unlike Expression, Lightroom does not manage video or audio that could be associated with your images. That makes sense, it really is a photographer's digital darkroom.
Expression still does more in terms of digital asset management.
Hi Michael, you said: "That was the reason I had individual catalogs for each shoot." I do this too, just because I prefer to have everything from a job in one place and self contained.
The question is will I have a problem reading these older version LR catalogs either now or down the line? I already found out I can't use the beta version catalogs in the current pre ver 2 LR.
Thanks!
Paul -
Yes, this is the problem I encountered when I upgraded to Lightroom 2.0. With individual catalogs I'd have to go in and upgrade them all to 2.0 so that they are readable in the future. And since every job had an individual Lightroom catalog that was a lot of catalogs to sift through. Just one more reason that I switched over to one main Lightroom catalog and am loving the DAM capabilities of this new version.
Hello Michael,
Talking about Digital Asset Management
you mention LightRoom 2 and Extensis Portfolio.
For managing assets LR cannot do what Portfolio does and one of the most restrictive aspect of LR is that it does not catalog any CMYK images nor does it read any BMP, EPS,PDF, GIF, AI.
LightRoom should not be called a digital asset management program without first mentioning this fact.
Andre