My Lightroom comments continue to get a lot of attention, so we’ll continue the conversation one last time.
First up, I want to point out that my dilemma isn’t that Lightroom doesn’t have a lot of features or performance. It’s soley my observation that I’m not sure that Adobe is doing enough to both satisfy existing users and attract new ones for me to continue to recommend it as the go-to choice.
This centers on something I write about a lot: what user problem is being solved? For Lightroom, that originally was the late Jeff Schewe’s observation that now that serious photographers where taking many more photos, we needed a place to put them, organize them, and process them (when necessary). Lightroom’s genious was that it treated your ingested images as components in a database, but designed the database to operate in ways that would directly solve photographers’ key needs. The database itself was well hidden from the Lightroom user, but the benefits of the data-driven approach were externalized in a UI that was (mostly) what a photographer might want to use.
The problem with the database approach is two-fold now. For someone new to collecting, maintaining, and processing photographs, Lightroom Classic's a bit much. For someone who’s been using it for a long period of time the size and complexity of the underlying data is starting to feel slow or cumbersome, and deep dives into your material get more difficult if you didn’t get it 100% organized the first time around. That last bit is where some AI-based browser/catalogs are starting to look faster, more modern, and direct.
I’ll give a personal example of how things can start to not work right with Lightroom. When I needed some photos of Chas Glazer for my recent article on his death, I knew immediately where to look for them and just pointed Photo Mechanic at the appropriate folders. A quick scroll and I found what I wanted. Had I been using Lightroom, finding those images of Chas would have more dependent upon me having entered the right keywords and doing the right organization within Lightroom for the database-driven filters to find them quickly. My observation is that not many Lightroom Classic users have been doing enough keywording and organization to quickly pull up exactly what they need, and some of that has to do with the way the program has grown coupled with the way the UI is scattered.
Lightroom Classic as it stands today is a very good program, but it’s starting to rely too much on the user solving their own problems, and not enough on the program solving the user problems. Frankly, I believe it’s due for a fairly strong overhaul if it’s going to remain the go-to choice for serious photographers. Which is why I asked the question of my readership.
It seems that quite a few of you agree with me that we’ve sort of come to a crossroad with Lightroom Classic, and some of you are clearly taking a different route now. At the same time, a large group of you are fine, but would just like a few refinements here and there.
For now, I’m leaving my recommendation intact. But, as always, I’ll continue to examine what’s available and try to make rational and justified recommendations as we move forward.
Meanwhile, here’s some additional followup to your comments:
“I now use DxO PhotoLab.”
Of all the folk that left Lightroom Classic (or are in the middle of leaving it), this was the number one destination. I tend to concur. While PhotoLab has some limits and needs a bit more polish, it’s a really solid product now, and produces consistent, excellent results.
“I’m using DxO PhotoLab for processing, but still use the Lightroom catalog.”
This brings up an interesting point. As imaging software has gotten better, I’ve found that my processing of an image taken five or more years ago is improved if I just start over. So having Lightroom Classic remember all my choices really isn’t all that useful as time elapses and we process differently. The interesting thing is that if you stop paying for Lightroom Classic, the catalog still works. So if you’re really just leaning on Lightroom for cataloging, paying the monthly tithe isn’t buying you much.
I think I’m going to have to do a video on this for the upcoming byThom MAX to show you what I mean, and how much you can rely upon an expired subscription version of Lightroom Classic. But that’s for future Thom to deal with, right now current Thom is writing this.
“Another lock-in might be profiles.”
For a few users that have been using things like the Lumariver Profile Designer, yes, I can see that. I’d generally say, though, that if you’re running other profiling with Lightroom Classic, that’s a bit of a failure on Adobe’s part. As I wrote recently about color, Adobe’s own color models aren’t optimal for a Nikon user (and maybe not for other brands, too, though I’ve stopped trying to evaluate that). I’ve been harping on that for over a decade. Many of you don’t remember that Nikon had a plug-in for Photoshop which did the demosaic for NEF files early in the digital era, and we got used to Photoshop results matching camera results. Then the “breakup” occurred with D2x, and Adobe went their own way.
“Sidecars are a problem.”
Yes and no. There’s no clear win on this issue. If you want reversable changes to a file, then data has to be saved in addition to the results. If you save data in the file, this starts to make the file potentially incompatible with other products, as they may not see/use that data. If you save the data outside the file in a sidecar, then you have the problem that the original file and sidecar need to be kept together. The good news here is that .XMP data is now a recognized standard, so perhaps we’ll see better solutions moving forward as more programs learn to use it within a file, and more operating systems learn that they have to manage a pair of files together.
“If you keep running Lightroom Classic on the same computer for a decade, it will get slower. OS upgrades demand more resources, you have more files than you did with the slower drives you probably have, and so on.”
Absolutely. The notion that you just buy a computer and use it forever is a false hope. At least if you’re doing more than just Web browsing, email, and other casual uses (which can be done perfectly well on a phone or tablet these days, so I’m not sure why you’re holding onto a computer forever).
For Mac users, the M1 chips and reliance on SSD changed things. There’s a real line in the sand that happened around 2019, and if you’re on the wrong side of that line, that the “things are getting slower” problem isn’t solely due to Lightroom Classic, it’s a foundational issue you’re facing. Double that if you’re still relying upon hard drives and anything slower than Thunderbolt for external drives. On the Windows side, it isn’t so clear, but I’ve felt that the Wintel platform has been long-in-the-tooth and not keeping up for some time now.
Security concerns alone—if your computer connects to the Internet then you have security concerns—are starting to force hardware upgrades, as well, as neither Apple nor Microsoft can really afford to keep everything they’ve ever made secure forever. The question I get asked a lot is “how long will my new computer be good for?” The answer is forked: (a) if you’re a casual user not pushing performance boundaries of any kind and bought enough computer to start with, then probably right until your manufacturer no longer supports it with security updates (for Apple that tends to be about seven to ten years); and (b) if you need top-level performance, then you should be upgrading every other generation, which tends to be about every two or three years. So that’s the range: two to ten years, and no more.
The good news is that typically when you update your computer, you’ll get a bit of performance back, even if your Lightroom catalog has grown mammoth. On the Mac side, that’s mostly been due to faster memory and SSD with each generation.
“Picture Window Pro is still available.”
Hmm, yes Picture Window Pro is still available. Jonathan Sachs, the author, was one of the co-founders of Lotus and helped create Lotus 1-2-3, a seminal Windows spreadsheet. While it appears that Jonathan is still maintaining the program, the UI is still very 1990’s (if I recall correctly, Jonathan started his digital photography exploration about the same time as I did in the late 80’s). Nothing overly wrong with that, though this Windows-only program will immediately conjure up visions of Windows 95 when you use it.
“You avoided any discussion of Lightroom (cloud) versus Lightroom Classic.”
I was hoping you wouldn’t notice ;~).
Adobe, like all the big tech players, wants to “own you.” Getting you de-centralized—your images stored on the company’s servers, not your computer—is a common technique to do that. I’m not a fan. Some things, yes, belong on centralized servers, but generally not personal data. The supposed benefit for photographers is that all your photos can be shared by all your devices. Almost all the big players here (Apple, Google, Microsoft) neglect to tell you that you can do the same thing locally with a NAS (network attached storage). A NAS does take a bit of geekdom to set up properly for that, so the cloud companies would also say they’re selling your convenience when you lock into their centralized solution.
I don’t really see Adobe being one of the big players in cloud storage. I don’t think they have the size or the user base to be a winner in that category, though they can certainly build a niche offering that might be profitable for them. Lightroom (not Lightroom Classic) was an attempt to bring the local image handling capabilities to the cloud realm, and across all your devices (phone, tablet, computer). It sort of works, though with a few dissonances to the Classic product that might trip you up.
I think that Adobe was looking more to the so-called creators as opposed to photographers when Lightroom and the cloud aspects were being fleshed out. But now that Apple is building out their own Creative Suite, I’ve found it simpler and easier to work with that for the role I think Adobe was trying to fill.
But in general, I kept my discussion centered on Lightroom Classic, because that is what most of my readers have been using and are (sometimes) complaining about.
“Adobe telegraphed the future years ago when they named it Lightroom Classic instead of Desktop. It’s a legacy product from their point of view.”
True that. However it’s a cash cow that’s not being properly milked. Nor is Adobe seemingly trying to grow the herd. A strange metaphor, to be sure, but this is almost exactly my point: Adobe could do better. If they don’t, I can’t see anything other than a slow demise to Lightroom Classic’s user base as more modern and better solutions appear.
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And with that, I’m going to put a stake in the ground and say that we’ve surveyed the property thoroughly, and this is where we land. Not that I won’t again cover Adobe or its products in the future. It’s that I’ve resolved for the moment to continue recommending Lightroom Classic. If I change my mind on that, I’ll pull up the stake and we’ll do another survey…
FWIW, this was one of the pending things I needed to work through as I rewrite my Web site, so thanks for the help. As I’ve noted before, I’m going through everything on byThom (other than the news) and rewriting it. I want the new site when it appears to be current, even better considered and written than before, and accurate to my thoughts today, not yesterday.