Lightroom 1.41

[drg]

An Update for Lightroom is now available at www.adobe.com or click on your "Check for Updates" in the Help menu.

1.41 fixes the problems associated w/1.4 and adds some new cameras.

[Photo-John]

Do you know what the problems with 1.4 were? I'm running 1.41 and it's working fine. But I'm wondering what the differences are besides support for new cameras. I tried to open Adobe's read me file for the upgrade but it wouldn't open.

[Xia_Ke]

John, check this thread:

Lightroom 1.4 . . . . .

[drg]

Do you know what the problems with 1.4 were? I'm running 1.41 and it's working fine. But I'm wondering what the differences are besides support for new cameras. I tried to open Adobe's read me file for the upgrade but it wouldn't open.

Adobe added support for Canon 450D-XSi, Nikon D60, Sony A350 and other cameras.

New Printer Drivers.

Fixed EXIF corruption. Exported files had corrupted time stamps.

There were some import/conversion problems that some experienced that are discussed in the link from Xia_Ke link that were part of the pulled 1.4 upgrade that have also been resolved.

[SmartWombat]

I'm glad I saw that thread before accepting the 1.4 upgrade.
Now I'm back home with fast internet I'm going to get 1.4.1

[drg]

Two week+, it seems stable and I've not been tripped up by anything.

I don't remember the minimal EXIF editing (you can change the creation date/time stamp of a file) previously??

EXIF does seem to work fine now.

[SmartWombat]

I am getting crash after crash importing images.
They imported fine in Lightroom 1 at release.
Now in 1.4.1 the preview window sometimes shows a grey square, with no image.
I've learned that if that happens, the import will fail - guaranteed.
I don't know what they've done, but it's certainly no improvement there.

The memory leaks with "Out of Memory" written upside down and back to front (I kid you not) instead of my image have reduced drastically.
But my use of Lightroom is reducing as it fails to import more often.

[drg]

Smart Wombat,

This sounds like what we fixed with one machine by completely reloading windows. It was a Dell Latitude and is still flaky on a couple of other topics, but it does get some heavy use. We are NOT using Vista for any of our LR machines. Only XP.

Did you mention something about in one post a Service Pack issue? Someone did and I've heard since that some users were able to install most of their post 1.0 releases without SP2?? I found one machine that hadn't been updated and it wouldn't install (I forget which, but I can look if helps) one update until the Service Pack(2) was properly upgraded.

As you have many, many, files/images, how many Catalogs are you supporting as well? The smallest I'm running is 150,000 images spread over 16 Catalogs and three drives (two internal and one USB 2.0). The largest number of files is about 300,000 on one machine (they are fairly small images for print catalogs) and I've got 600+Gb on another machince (two drives) but a much lower number of files as they are huge TIFs from film scans. I've got one customer support notebook (a Toshiba) that has 75-80 Catalogs (I'm not sure the number today) with 500-800 files in each Catalog.

I haven't seen a crash of LR other than trying to do too many things at once on the computer. Too many apps open, switching rapidly between screens with the mouse, etc. Oh the vicissitudes of Microsoft Windows.

I am curious though as to the nature of your issues as I'm finding more and more people who have very different Windows based problems depending upon where they are in the world. Windows releases/versions/OEM distributions etc. don't seem to be created equal...

As one feature not well documented, I regularly create a Catalog on a removable drive such a USB drive, then just disconnect/remove the drive with its half a TB or so of images and switch to a new Catalog. If I need to use those files, I reconnect/initialize the drive, and then switch to that Catalog. I don't really know exactly how many total images are 'active' at a given time in a couple of copies of LR I've got running. Rough guess could be that one machine may have 10-12 TB of files 'available' but not all online at a given moment. Lots of big MF and some LF scans that approach the magic 10,000 pixel limit.

I continue to be interested in various users problems with the database and file issues as this became very critical for me last summer and fall , though my issues were not with Adobe LR.

[SmartWombat]

Well in LR2 the limit is 30000 pixels, you will be able to make bigger images

I have installed new ATI drivers for the Radeon 9250, and not wanting to tempt fate I won't say how long the machine has gone for without crashing.

I had a single catalog for my 3 TB NAS, all 400000 images.
Had because I needed to move to the backup NAS and Lightroom got horribly confused.
I think I now have 3 attempts at rebuilding the catalog, all flawed to some extent.

[Photo-John]

DRG and Wombat-
You guys are both using catalogues. I'm not. Or at least, I don't think I am. Can you explain how and why you use the catalogue feature? What's the strategy?

[victorhuang20]

I haven't had a problem with lightroom yet, but im no pro, i use a macbook for all my photo stuff. my pc is for gaming...heh and other awesome things! It's really easy to use, and I enjoy using it, i tried apeture...its pretty good but so far i like lightroom better

[gahspidy]

DRG and Wombat-
You guys are both using catalogues. I'm not. Or at least, I don't think I am. Can you explain how and why you use the catalogue feature? What's the strategy?

I'd be interested in knowing this as well. How and why are you using catalogues? What is the benefit.
My method has been very simple so far. . . .Everything is in My Pictures folder which contains sub folders according to date. Clients have there own folders named after them.
all this was imported into LightRoom with new folders being created in lightroom as I need them. Of course, all this gets backed up to my external drive periodically.

[drg]

DRG and Wombat-
You guys are both using catalogues. I'm not. Or at least, I don't think I am. Can you explain how and why you use the catalogue feature? What's the strategy?

Everybody uses a Catalog.

ADOBE Photoshop Lightroom is first a Database Manager. Thats what we paid for and is the key to its organizational power. The database was originally (including file structures for Import and Export) based on the public domain SQL 3 Lite model.

http://www.sqlite.org/ - Note the ADOBE logo and sponsorship (as of 4/30/2008)


ADOBE Lightroom - Catalogs

( I'm going to use the American spelling of Catalogs. )

There is some confusion in what the Catalog is as some of third-party writers didn't read a release note or two. Simply, the Catalog is the Database that Lightroom manages. Lightroom can generate multiple, separate db's (databases) via the New Catalog under the pulldown File menu in the upper left of your (PC versions 1.xx) screen. There is also there the ability to Open Catalog or Open Recent options as well to switch the database.

In LR 1.0, and thus in much of the earlier documentation and many books and manuals still widely available, this is referred to as the Library. With LR 1.1, the file naming conventions were changed as well as the nomenclature for the menus. The base files (indexes, virtual pointers, etc) for the database went from the extension *.lrdb to *.lrcat. So, your base Lightroom file is now called

Lightroom Catalog.lrcat

as the default. You can create a new database, called i.e. Other which then will result in a file being created called Other.lrcat which you can specify, where you want it physically (disk/storage path) to reside. The file can be called whatever you want, more below.

These *.lrcat files can be exported moved, backed up (which LR does automatically if scheduled) and even worked with by external tools if you are so inclined. These are the one mentioned above in the SQL model. I haven't looked since early versions to see what the structure is, so there are changes and I'm not going to go further with that topic at this time.

Catalogs give the LR user the ability to further physically segregate their work be it individual weddings, conference events, month/daily/etc. delineations as well as virtually within the database via keywording and other sorting tags and techniques.

Security, ease of backup, record locking (yes it is implemented and minimally documented), and efficiency are part of the reason to consider Cataloging as well as Folders. Folders are just fields in a data base that a have a one to many relationship (for you tech types).

Smaller databases (Catalogs) have smaller indexes and *.lrcat files and thus it is quicker to do Catalog Backups.

The one consideration of multiple Catalogs, is that I haven't discoverd an 'easy' way of searching across all of them with LR. Only one Catalog is active on the screen at a time, and the photographs in the other databases is not available. They are physically distinct from one another, though through some 'trickery' you can export information 'between' them, but you still have to switch.

The same photograph can be in multiple databases! Thus, if you want to have a B/W conversion database, you can and as the changes are virtuall, the orignal file can be kept as one copy.

If you want to have a Catalog that is your portifolio with images drawn from a variety of places and times, but not have anything else in that 'collection' you can do that as well.

A Strategy - Work Flow example

I mentioned a Customer support machine with Many Catalogs.

1. These are distinct databases for customers named by the customer number or in a few cases, the customer name.

2. This allows the tablet/PC running Lightroom to use its Slideshow functions to show the customer what is available.

3. The PC can be either used standalone, plugged into a Video suite system or directly to a properly equipped television.

4. There are no photographs from any other customer in their database, thus there's no displaying unwanted images.

5. The customer and rep can play with selection (flags, ratings, etc) in that database to their hearts content and make an order or use the information as required.

Real slick, real simple, and it is all built into the Lightroom.

I still recommend The ADOBE Photoshop Lightroom Book by Martin Evening, Adobe Press. It does require some 'translation' to the most recent versions, but the history and origins or the product as mentioned are enlightening and very useful. Several of the third-party books, are just plain wrong and you'll never get some of their 'suggestions' to work reliably. There's a fairly new book (I won't mention which one) that if you don't have the full version CS3 and Adobe Illustrator (Might as well purchase the $1000+ Creative suite), half of the book is worthless. And it doesn't mention that you need anything other than Lightroom! Also the workflows dictated in some of the books are excessive as well.

If you have other questions, I'll do my best to dig through what I've learned and I've got some more 'workflow' ideas for the LR users to come.