George Jardine, former Adobe Lightroom Evangelist, writes about Library Folder Organisation and does it matter?

Eric Scouten, former Lightroom engineer, now working on Adobe Revel, has posted an update to his previous articles on Catalog organisation. These are always useful articles, mainly because they make you analyse your own workflow, to either improve or validate it! And if we can improve it then we can work faster and smarter!

John Beardsworth on his new home for Lightroom related info, Lightroom Solutions, discusses Lossy DNG and the advantages and disadvantage of the extended format.

I think there is definitely an issue of file management lurking to bite the unwary photographer. If you are happy to downsize your DNGs then you need to be aware of which files are affected. Application UI is one way, and file naming is another.

I can’t see myself using Lossy DNG for downsampling files, but as mentioned in passing by John, I can see myself converting iPhoneography created imagery to the Lossy DNG format, and then nothing is lost.

James Duncan Davidson, perhaps best known in the photography world as a conference photographer, has written an article on ways of managing large Libraries (which is equally appropriate for Aperture as it is for Lightroom users).

I imagine that when these, or indeed any photo management applications, were created the developers hadn’t quite considered the management possibilities and pitfalls of truly huge Catalogs.

Huge Catalogs are perfectly manageable, and very useful for searching through all your images, but do you need to keep all of your images? Some will say “Yes, because you never know…” and others are perfectionists who keep only the best. As other strategies have shown, there can be a use for a holding Catalog to hone what you import. This can mitigate against bloat, but it will only hold off for a while

One way to tackle questionable images is to put them into a Collection, and revisit them after a period of time. That will give you a fresh perspective and may avoid hasty judgements which lead you to delete an image which later down the line has some potential. You could take that further and put them in a separate To Be Revisited Catalog, so you still use Lightroom rather than another piece of software, as described in James’ article.

Sean McCormack has released LRB Preset Pack Vol 1 containing some of his most used effects. It ranges from Black and White to heavily processed colour looks for people photography. The Presets borrow from current fashion trends, but equally apply to bands, portraits and fashion.

They come with a full-colour user guide and are available for the introductory price of €10 (+ VAT in the EU).

For more info visit the LRB Plugins site.

There are quite a few Keyword lists available to download for Lightroom, and it is worth a quick roundup to keep these in a central post.

Granddaddy of them all is probably the Controlled Vocabulary list produced by David Riecks. Now at Version 3, this is a set of 11,000 organised in a hierarchical structure. There is an alternative version which has all the terms have been moved down the hierarchy by one level, following a suggestion by Eric Scouten in his post. The cost is $69.99 for the list and a year’s subscription.

Next up is Shangara Singh’s Keyword Catalog. This contains 28,000 keywords and is a boon for Stock Photographers. The list is divided into 39 categories, which can be viewed here. A free demo is available here, and the catalog is available for £49.99 for personal use, and £99.99 for business use.

D-65 who run Lightroom Workflow courses also have a Digital Workflow Keyword list which contains 5,500 hierarchical keywords.

Nick Potter has produced some free (but welcomes a donation) Keyword Lists, divided into seven categories: Geography, Animals, Colours, Natural Landforms, Bodies of Water, Buildings and Weather.

Sean McCormack has a list of Action Keywords (adjectives) containing about 250 keywords.

Tony Wu has a Marine Life list costing $99 and is available for Aperture as well.

Fleeting Glimpse Images has a series of Keyword Lists, including Birds of North America (4767 for $9.95), Birds of Costa Rica (1799 for $6.95), Mammals of North America (1008 for $6.95) and Natural Forms (641 for $4.95).

Mark Wilson of Rusticolus Images has some Bird Keyword lists, for British, North American and Western Palearctic in English and Italian. He has just updated them with further lists of European Mammals and European Amphibians.

Bureau22 provides some donationware Country based keywords for Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, and France as well as some German translations of Nick Potter’s Bodies of Water, Weather, and Natural Landforms lists

Finally, I recently released a Keyword list of Damselflies and Dragonflies of the UK. This is a hierarchical list with Latin names included as Synonyms.

Here is a Keyword List of Damselflies and Dragonflies of the UK. This contains the official list provided by the British Dragonfly Society. The list contains migrant and vagrant species as well as UK extinct species.
The Latin names are included as Synonyms and are listed hierarchically.

I am releasing these as Donationware, if you have a use for them, please consider a small donation to cover the time to create. Anything over $1 is possible! Donations are via PayPal and are secure.

Eric Scouten, of the Lightroom team, blogs, takes photos and tweets about Lightroom. Last year he wrote an article explaining his workflow methodology with Lightroom. He has just updated this with the new 2009 edition, and his workflow has changed quite radically.

I really like the idea of an Incubator Catalog, and one I tend to use when away on shoots. Some of the deeper aspects are probably more down to how you shoot and won’t be to all tastes, but it is well worth a read.

With the growing popularity of D-SLR’s being able to shoot video, Lightroom’s lack of import/management for these file types has become a limitation. Jeffrey Friedl has created Video-Asset Management a Plug-in to allow a small amount of video management within Lightroom.

The Macintosh Performance Guide has published an article with a section on Optimizing Lightroom. This is Mac based but will be of use to Windows users as well.

Thomas Hawk offers his Photography Workflow for 2009. It is interesting but I am not sure if it couldn’t be improved using better software than Canon Camera Window, and he could also use Trails on his iPhone.

Peter Krogh has backed up his new edition of The DAM Book with a new blog.

Nik Software has now added the Sharpener Pro 3.0 Update to its expanding collection of Lightroom software. Whether you see any benefit over the built-in sharpening which is based on the Pixel Genius routines is a moot point.

And last, but not least Wade Heninger posts a Lightroom Tuesday column.