The 30 day trial is key — there’s almost no chance I would have picked LR v2 up without being able to try it “for real” for a while.

I’ve been feeling the pain of inadequate management tools for my slowly but inexorably increasing photos directory tree. My workflow prior to Lightroom was (is, since I haven’t really committed to LR yet):

1. Shoot lots of photos.
2. [Download all the pictures using Downloader Pro onto the laptop; manually copy them to an external disk.]
3. [Look through them with Breezebrowser Pro.]
4. At home, copy all the photos from the external disk to the desktop (or download them using Downloader Pro if the photo shooting if I was home the same day as I shot the photos, as in when I am not traveling)
5. Sort through them in Breezebrowser Pro tagging the ones I like, using Photoshop and Camera Raw to prepare any I like to post or use for something. If they’re to post, ruthlessly edit down to very few with multiple passes in Breezebrowser untagging photos that do not make the cut. If they’re for family, the bar is a bit lower since I get flack when I shoot hundreds of shots and share .. four with them.
6. Use CR/PS to open, crop, jigger exposure, sometimes edit; post and/or write to DVD-R appropriately.
7. When I post, I add metadata (title, keywords) to the file using PS and carefully use the export path that preserves that and the EXIF metadata (not Save For Web…, but Save As…JPEG). This metadata can be consumed by both Flickr and my own photo album software. Lots of other things too.
8. Once and a while I’d use Bridge to tag the entire shoot’s worth of photos with something to identify them later, but not usually because Bridge is just too slow even when fed only one directory/shoot’s worth of photos.

I didn’t have any good way to store or search on metadata across the whole tree. And the PS/BR/DL workflow is kind of clunky.

With Lightroom, once it’s all configured, it’s more like:

1. Download using LR, having LR copy to the backup drive when applicable (*) According to forums, I have not set this up yet, but will certainly do so before the trial runs out..
2. Sort, choose, tag photos in LR.
3. Jigger exposure, crop all in LR for shots that make the cut.
4. Export from LR with metadata intact. The only bummer about this bit is that when I used to do bulk exports, BreezeBrowser made it easy to just extract the embedded “thumbnail” in the raw file, which was much faster than converting the raw file and the “thumbnail” with my current cameras is 3MP or more, plenty for web.
5. Metadata remains searchable and browsable far more easily than the huge tree of directories I have.

LR is not as fast as I’d like (BR is just crazy fast at display even when fed hundreds of shots in a directory) but it’s fast enough for its other wins to be very enticing. I need to put it on the laptop and see how it works as if I was traveling and then came home. Some forum surfing indicates this flow can be very nice.

Also the fact that it’s easy to Stack the original with any edited versions (in the rare cases I need more than LR’s built-in nondestructive edits like cropping or exposure/curves/etc) is very nice.

I’ve already unearthed some shots I liked but missed using my old workflow. One thing I really, really like about LR: it’s easy to configure it (with a performance cost) to always keep metadata with the actual photos (embedded in JPEGs, sidecar .XMP files for raw files). Some things don’t get represented this way (e.g. Stacks).

A big reason I’ve avoided tools like this for so long is I got thoroughly burned once by Thumbs+ when I spent an afternoon carefully adding metadata to all my photos which got stashed away in Thumbs+’s db .. and then it blew up and lost the db somehow. Not even my normally relatively diligent backup procedures saved me there (nightly).

It seems like a win. It’s big enough that I may need to pick up a book on it to really leverage it well, but even without anything other than a cursory surfing through some forums and its own help it’s looking like a big improvement to my workflow.

Microsoft Photo Info enables easy editing of “metadata” for digital photographs from inside Windows Explorer.

  Photo Info is not quite as snappy as PixVue used to be, but has the bonus of the company that created it still being in business. I can no longer find any download sites for PixVue that I trust.

Photo Info seems be to nice enough and gets the job done.

It’s a visible upgrade from the 50/1.8.

I prefer chilly, clear days to mild, rainy days, so the last couple days weather has been a treat.

It feels like a nice, brisk fall day in New England.

Meanwhile, it has been unseasonably mild in New England this winter. I was there over the holidays and it felt like spring.

I’m sure it’s handy for other kinds of group shots, too. It’s obviously nice to get everyone looking natural and nice in a single photo the old fashioned way but having this in the bag can be very reassuring after every one of the first 20 shots have only a subset of everybody looking photogenic.

As far as I can tell the chances of everyone looking photogenic in a single exposure goes down as an exponent of the number of people in the photo. It seems like this should be linear but I’ve experimentally determined that it’s probably exponential.

I have no comment on how it might be useful to assemble a family photo in which everybody is looking the wrong way, picking a nose, or choking one another.

I gave the 500mm spotting scope another shot. I put it on the 20D, stuck the tripod plate on it, and hauled it out to one of the bird watching decks in Baylands park. There’s a few more on photos.xythian.com. After a bit with the stationary spotting scope, I put it away and went for a walk with the more portable telephoto zoom lens.

The MSR page also links to the Interactive Digital Photomontage paper that Group Shot is based on, including a bunch of GPL, cross-platform software to play with. I haven’t yet played with that software but I’m looking forward to seeing what it can do.

The end of the year is always busy and usually involves a bunch of travel for me. It takes some time to get back on track. I’ve been posting some photos over the last few weeks.

A trip to Big Basin Redwoods State Park late last year reminded me that the drive there is entirely worth it. It’s so very quiet and .. woodsy.

I had never noticed raptors in Fort Funston before. I didn’t see this one until I was browsing through the photos when I got home. This is a tiny crop of a 100mm snapshot of the Golden Gate bridge shot from one of the paths in Fort Funston.

I headed out at around 1:30am early last Sunday morning, picked up my friend, and drove to the end of Embarcadero in Palo Alto with a clear Northern view over the bay. I wanted to see Stardust‘s re-entry. Sadly, while we saw some lovely airplanes, neither one of us saw Stardust’s re-entry. North from Palo Alto, across the bay, is: Oakland and Berekely. They sure are bright.

2:00am is a good time to commute, though — there’s not much traffic.

After the walk along Moss Landing State Beach, I continued down Route One to the 17 Mile Drive. This was the first time I had driven along the 17 Mile Drive. There are some spectacular views, but being surrounded by a golf course was strange. Spectacular untouched Pacific Coast, spectacular untouched Pacific Coast, spectacular untouched Pacific Coast, and then golf course.

I drove along 17 mile drive, stopping to get out and shoot pictures and walk several times. By the time I got to the end of the drive (marked by shops and restaurants, and the entrance to Pebble Beach) I was tired of driving. I did see one deer.