considering migrating to Lightroom

[Jorge del Valle]

I've been using iMatch for a few years now, but I'm considering a switch to LR3 with the hope of simplifying my workflow. My previous workflow involved mainly Bridge (renaming, rating, culling), ACR (editing) & iMatch (cataloguing). Seems like with LR3 I could do all that with just one application, which should save quite a bit of time.

I've been reading about LR3 in several forums and reviews, but most of the information I find is about the image editing capabilities of LR3, and not so much about its DAM capabilities. I've also been reading very mixed reports on the speed of the software, both as an image editor and as a DAM application. So I was hoping some of the people in this forum, which is (obviously) very DAM oriented would be able to give me some impressions about it. Any advice on moving from iMatch to LR3 would be very welcome too.

Some specific questions I have are:

• How fast is LR3 for browsing/displaying images? This is one of my frustrations with iMatch. I suppose you have to generate previews to get optimum performance, but is it fast after that? By fast I mean when there's virtually no wait when you are looking at an image and click the arrow to look at the next.
  
• Does it feel fast for searching through a database? In the iMatch forums this is one of the things that I've heard cited as a downside for LR when compared to iMatch, which is admittedly pretty fast at finding all images in a collection of, say, 50,000 that contain certain keywords in just a few seconds. It seems that in most cases the negative comments refer to older versions of LR. Any improvement in LR3 in this area?
  
• I have a bunch of files in JPEG and Nikon NEF format files that I want to convert to DNG. Will I be able to do the conversion directly within Lightroom, with the metadata (keywords, IPTC fields, etc) transferring over to the new files?
  

I have many more questions, but I won't ask them for now so I can keep the post a bit more focused.

I'll be downloading LR3 and running some of my own tests with it, but it would be useful to hear what people with reasonably big image catalogue sizes have to say after having used it for a while.

Unfortunately I won't be able to test LR3 with a "proper" image database to compare performance with iMatch. This is because my own catalogue is in shambles due to a combination of not properly reconstructing my backups after my computer died and I swapped some hard drives, which left me partially without data redundancy for a short while, and some idiot with great sense of timing that decided to break into my flat and take what wasn't his (laptop, camera & lenses among other things).

At least this incident has made me update my backup system to something much more robust, so hopefully I won't find myself in this situation again.

Thanks in advance for any info.

Jorge

[johnbeardy]

Jorge

I've not looked at iMatch for a few years, but I always respected it as a powerful program - despite an interface so ugly only its mother could love it! Incidentally, iMatch has an excellent scripting engine, so you could use it to automate Adobe's DNG Converter. That way you'd be able to see DNG files' adjusted previews within iMatch.

I think you will find that iMatch is faster at browsing/displaying and database activity. That's partly because it began as a database program and has stayed so, while LR began as Adobe Camera Raw with a database and some might think its DAM features don't get enough attention. For example, it's hard to search on some fields (eg copyright) while there are other shoddy omissions (eg to find images whose title is empty you have to search for the absence of letters). In terms of search speed, though, LR's decently quick - and I've tested with a catalogue with > 250k images.

However, LR does offer you the chance to do all that work in one app, as you say in your first paragraph, and that can save time and hassle.

John

[BobSmith]

I had a workflow similar to yours except using Expression Media instead of iMatch.  I was working in Bridge, ACR, Photoshop, and Expression Media.  Over the past few months I've transitioned to Lightroom.  I love the simplicity of one app and one catalog that does just about everything I need.  I still go into Photoshop for certain editing tasks but the bulk of my work is done all in Lightroom.  I have about 100K images in my Lightroom catalog.  Performance is fine... and I'm not exactly working on a powerhouse system.  Most of the time I'm working on a 13" MacBook (2.53GHZ, 8GB RAM, 1TB slow but spacious drive).  If you take the time to build full size previews.  You can zip from one image to the next with rarely any delay at all. 

Bob Smith

[Jorge del Valle]

One of the reasons I'm thinking about doing the switch has to do with the burglary of my flat and the loss of backups as a result. Other than having lost 2 years of photos I've also lost pretty much all the RAW editing I've done to the images that didn't get stolen.

That's why I suspect I may save hundreds of hours if I use a LR3, since I'll eventually have to redo all the editing and using LR I wouldn't have to jump back and forth from one program to another but can stay in one for both editing and cataloguing. It also means I'd have to spend about 270GBP for a LR3 license, but when you divide that cost by the number of hours it may save me it starts seeming worth it to fork out the cash.

I do like the flexibility that I get with iMatch, but it seems that lots of times that flexibility comes at the cost of being a semi-professional programmer. I can do some scripting, but I still find iMatch too complex to use for some tasks. The interface drives me mental sometimes too.

I don't know, the jury is still out, but I'm leaning towards LR3 as at this point simplifying my workflow is worth a lot to me.

Thanks for the feedback guys. If there are any other things that any forum members would still like to add I'd still love the input.

Jorge

[John Yaeger]

Say, Bob, I wonder. . .

Now that you sound content in Lightroom, do you only refer to your EM workflow when you want to pull or view images that might still be indexed in EM? Or might you have converted all of that work to Lightroom. It seems like that would be a whale of a task, but I'm only guessing.

John

[BobSmith]

Converting wasn't as big of a hassle as I had imagined.  I still have my EM catalogs and can refer to them if needed but I've rarely needed to.  I relied mostly on catalog sets in EM so I was anxious about ways to properly transfer that.  Bottom line is I just didn't worry about it.  Between keywords and the fact that folder names typically include the client's name somewhere in the directory tree, I was able to easily build smart collections in Lightroom that would pull everything from a given client.  It was fairly easy after that to organize them further as needed.  I've  been pretty good about using star ratings and labels (applied both in EM and Bridge... Lightroom sees the Bridge version).  That helps to quickly find the most important images.

I'm doing a better job of keeping things organized now that I'm working with one large catalog rather than several smaller ones.  I typically kept a separate catalog for each year in EM.  Keeping track of work that flowed across multiple catalogs was always just problematic enough that I wouldn't stay on top of it like I should. 

I have my archive in buckets ala the DAM Book.  Raws, DNGs and Derivatives are on separate drives.  I would give Lightroom twenty or thirty buckets to import at a time and just let it cook.  Worked just fine.

The fact that Lightroom 3 added some more important file types (for me)... cmyk and movies... was the tipping point to get me to make the switch.  I'm glad that I did.

Bob Smith

[Jorge del Valle]

The fact that Lightroom 3 added some more important file types (for me)... cmyk and movies... was the tipping point to get me to make the switch.  I'm glad that I did.

Hey Bob, so you are saying that LR3 can catalog movies now? I didn't know that. That's good. I don't have a lot of movies but it would still be nice to be able to add them to my image database since I'm able to do that in iMatch. I thought by moving to LR3 I'd have to drop them out of the database.

Jorge

[BobSmith]

Yes, it does movies now.  I'm not sure how extensive the support is but for my minimal need it works fine.  I think this is essentially an answer for all the dslrs that shoot movies now.

Bob Smith

[johnbeardy]

I've been looking at movie support for a client. Lightroom's support is pretty minimal. It loads DSLR movie files and lets you rename them or move them between folders, so it makes sure you don't lose the files. You can add keywords and other metadata to movies or include them in collections but - unlike still images - there's no way to make that information travel with the videos.

OTOH my impressions of video metadata are that it's a long way short of what we expect of still images. So far Bridge seems the best place to add xmp format metadata directly inside the file, but there's no guarantee it'll be read by other programs - EM struggles for example, and Final Cut and After Effects seem to strip out any metadata. And when you pass on the video files to other organisations such as stock agencies, they seem to require metadata in text files rather than relying on whatever's in the image.

Lightroom has some way to go before it matches Bridge's handling of videos, and the rest of the "ecosystem" is pretty undeveloped.

John

[roberte]

Hi John,

Is it feasible to have Lightroom use Bridge to embed metadata?

I hear what you're saying about metadata standards for "video". Adobe Premiere has better metadata support but Final Cut is the de facto industry standard. Surely Apple care about upholding industry standards like metadata?

-- Robert.

[johnbeardy]

Hi Robert

Lightroom can certainly be made to trigger Bridge and send files to it (via LR's SDK), so I suspect you're right, and I wonder if Exiftool can also handle "movies" Even then, there's a fair chance the next app down the line will either strip or ignore it. But it's early days for me investigating this problem.

John

[Jorge del Valle]

One thing I asked that I don't think has been answered (although I suspect the answer is "yes"), is if I have a bunch of JPEG and NEF files keyworded in LR3 and I convert them to DNG (within LR3) do the keywords and other metadata get transferred to the new DNGs?

Just trying to figure this out now because whether the answer is yes or no it will determine whether I have to figure out a way to do the DNG conversion + metadata transfer in iMatch before migrating to LR3 (if I do decide to migrate in the end). I'll take a look at writing a script to launch DNG Converter from iMatch, as John suggests. I'll see if by doing it that way the images keep the metadata. I know the DNG converter keeps the metadata pertaining to image editing, but I was thinking more about keywords and the such. I'll run a couple of tests when I get home tonight.

Sorry to be asking all these questions about LR3 instead of testing myself, by the way. At this moment I'm focusing on re-organizing my iMatch database which is a pretty daunting task in itself. I want to get that done first so I can have a more tidy database to transfer to LR3, as it doesn't seem like a good idea to transfer the jumbled mess that I have right now to a new software I'm not familiar with. Once I'm done with the reorganizing I'll download an evaluation copy of LR3 and focus on transferring my database and testing LR3 with it. If I were to install an evaluation copy of LR3 now I fear I'd run out of the trial period before I have a "fixed" database to test with, and then I wouldn't be able to make an educated decision on whether to migrate. I hope this makes sense.

In the meantime I'm trying to gather as much information as I can so when time comes to try LR3 I can hit the ground running.

Thanks again guys.

Jorge

[johnbeardy]

One thing I asked that I don't think has been answered (although I suspect the answer is "yes"), is if I have a bunch of JPEG and NEF files keyworded in LR3 and I convert them to DNG (within LR3) do the keywords and other metadata get transferred to the new DNGs?

Yes. You also have an option to strip the metadata - useful in other circumstances.

John

[Jorge del Valle]

That's great to know. Thanks for the info John.

Jorge