Last week we started to discuss a beta product that impressed us: Adobe’s Lightroom, a workflow solution for importing, organizing, categorizing, tagging, comparing, selecting, developing and showcasing large digital image collections.
Now why would you care about managing digital images? Simple: Given the explosion of image content in organizations, finding tools that can handle enterprise workloads is a real challenge.
While there are many simple tools that do all the tasks involved with image manipulation and storage, the problem for IT is how to avoid having to deal with a load of spare parts flying in formation. Think of this as a subset of the bigger problem of general content management.
What we’re looking for are tools that streamline the processing of content, from its storage and labeling through to its editing and deployment. That’s where products such as Lightroom are so important – they are built to make the workflow organized and efficient.
Last week we talked about how robust the Lightroom beta is, but alas, we have to revise our comments. Originally we imported around 30,000 photos, and all seemed fine. But during import we kept running out of space and Lightroom kept pausing while we freed up storage.
After the import finished we got curious about how long the import would have taken without the pauses, so we deleted the image database and reimported a new set of photos (this time around 24,000) and found the complete process took around four days!
The slow speed wasn’t the importation but rather the indexing, which soaked up processor cycles to the point where the entire OS X system slowed way down. From online forums it appears that other testers have found the same problem.
Despite this performance issue and even though it is a beta release, the features of Lightroom are, as we briefly mentioned last week, outstanding in terms of user interface design (which is excellent in usability and sophistication) and workflow support.
Lightroom provides not only a Library view of your images but also a Develop feature that provides a range of fairly sophisticated photo-editing features and lets you jump out to the likes of Photoshop if you need more editing power.
The Slideshow feature creates (you guessed it) on-screen slideshows and exports them to PDF files with optional FTP uploading. The Print feature deals with (you guessed again) some pretty slick printing layout management, and the Web feature creates HTML or Flash photo galleries and as an option uploads them to a server via FTP.
A hot technology used by Lightroom is Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP). XMP is described by Adobe as “a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. With XMP, desktop applications and back-end publishing systems gain a common method for capturing, sharing and leveraging this valuable metadata.” Adobe refers to content that uses XMP as “smart assets.”
While the official Adobe description claims the XMP data is embedded, it is more often saved in what is called a sidecar file.
With Lightroom, the original image is never touched unless it is handed over to an external program; whatever changes you make using Develop are stored in the Lightroom database or in a sidecar file (currently an experimental implementation).
The sidecar file system is important because it can be sent along with the original image for further processing in another workflow system or for output by a service bureau, for example.
A feature of Lightroom that’s particularly interesting for IT is that Adobe intends the final release to have a software developer kit that will allow alternative workflows and new features that could include integration with other content management systems.
Lightroom is potentially a great product that attempts to provide in one program all the basic features – and quite a bit more – that a serious photographer or enterprise content manager needs.
Show your image to gearhead@gibbs.com.
