Many digital photographers use viewing/cataloguing software to keep track of their collections, Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom being a couple of the “big boys”. What follows is not a review but my short take on Lightroom (based on a post I made on the Ars Technica forums), for a decent review I suggest Ars Technica here: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/adobe-photoshop-lightroom-2-review.ars

I’m afraid my personal major concern is speed; I have over 140,000 digital photos starting with a Kodak 1.3meg camera (awful quality) in 1998 through to the present day where I have a Canon 5D that I shoot exclusively in RAW. I use ACDSee Pro to view my pictures and I must admit that’s all; I don’t use any other of it features so I can’t really say if it’s good or bad. What I do know is it’s fast and only produces thumbnails of files as I view the folders they are in (though I do know it can be set up to scan a whole library at once).

I really wanted to like Lightroom, I use Photoshop CS3 to edit pictures, and make my living – it’s a fabulous application, rock solid stability, lightning fast – even on file sizes approaching 2gig (posters; lots of smart objects & layers). I downloaded Lightroom and started it off cataloguing my collection, 24 hours or more later it finished, there followed another 24 hours of Vista disc thrashing whilst it indexed the stored thumbnails, Lightroom saving these as individual files. When this was finished it was still half the speed of ACDSee. That’s as far as it got, I have customers to keep happy (just) and a life to live (again, just), so it was un-installed at this point.

I know this is just my particular needs and it’s probably right for many people but initial impressions matter, attention spans are short and time is a precious thing so it had to go.

I should have guessed though, Adobe Bridge, bundled with CS3 has the speed of a rather bored snail also making it unusable…

This fish was no bigger than a shrimp when Lightroom started to catalogue his photo collection

A good week for photography as it’s Hastings Old Town Carnival so evenings are filled with people in fancy dress just waiting to be pictured. It’s too easy in many ways, take Pram Race on Wednesday. Like so many things in Old Town the basic premiss is built around the pub crawl. The technique to get great pictures is to find a place early between the pubs in George Street to avoid the absolute crush then just blast away with the camera, set to shutter priority and “auto AI” focussing, as the scene flies towards you, 713 pictures taken ending up with 80 “good ones”, not a bad haul.

The only problem is that it’s a pretty anti-social way of spending your time if you take it seriously as you can’t go with anyone – tagging along with someone intent on getting hundreds of pictures it not a fun experience! One year I’ll leave the camera behind, or perhaps not…

Just a normal Old Town evening out.