I recently installed LR2 and spent most of the weekend working with it. I have been using Scott Kelby's LR2 for Digital Photographers book to help me get my feet wet.

Here are a few thoughts that I have, and I'm wondering what others think. I imported over 50,000 photos from 2 external HD's in an effort to better manage my entire photo library. I was really looking forward to the asset management capabilities of LR2, but so far I am not too excited about it. LR2 was unable to recognize over 600 of my PSD files. These are the layered final versions of some of my best photos. The ones I spent a lot of time on tweaking. These are the photos that are the most important to me, and LR is telling me that I need to resave them... it will take a lot of time to track them all down and resave them.

LR2 seems to have slowed down my computer to the point where I'm not sure if it is worth it. (I was expecting this to some extent) Not just for looking at photos, but to import new photos from my memory card. Canon's Zoombrowser utility downloaded my images much faster than LR2 does. Perhaps that is because Zoombrowser was downloading my files to an internal HD where I have LR2 downloading to an external USB 2.0 drive. Also, I set the import up to down load a backup copy of my files to a separate external HD and it failed at that.

The Develop module uses almost the exact same tools as Adobe Camera RAW so I don't see that as a plus or a minus. I do like the idea of being able to do some local edits with LR2, but that really isn't a big deal for me as I can do them in PS just the same. I also think that ACR has a much cleaner layout when developing my RAW files than LR2 does. I get a much larger image also.

I haven't used the slideshow module yet, and I'm not sure that it's something I will ever use. I don't create slide shows for clients or for myself. Perhaps something I would do in the future, but not at this time.

The print module also seems to be something that I will not use. I don't print anything myself so I don't know if there is anything in there that will be of use for me.

I am excited about the web module. I have looked at some of the templates built in, and they look very nice. Nicer than what is available in PS CS3. I plan on installing CS4 this week, so it will be interesting to see what that offers for web galleries.

I'm giving some serious thought to completely uninstalling LR and going back to my Photoshop workflow using Bridge and PS. I hate to give up on LR2 without giving it a fair try, but right now, I really don't see it as a benefit to my workflow.

I guess the point of my ramblings are to get opinions from the more experienced LR users. Did you experience these same types of issues? Did it take some time to really develop a liking to the new LR workflow? Perhaps someone can point me in the right direction or give me some advice...