Why use Adobe Adobe Lightroom 4.0? One word - iPhoto. Being locked into Apple’s ecosystem is filled with both joy and pain. There’s the joy of having everything be easy to use and then there’s the pain of being in a closed environment. In most any other photo editing tool on Windows and Macs, users still have full access to their photo libraries. Not so with iPhoto.
The primary issue with iPhoto is that all of your images are stored in a custom database that doesn’t allow for easy exporting. There used to be a button that would allow you to dump everything into a backup drive. That button has been removed in recent updates, now you can only select individual photos to export, which is all well and good, but does not work too well if you have 10,000 photos.
If iPhoto goes wonky and you don’t have a time machine backup or if you would like to transfer your photo library to a non-Mac machine then you are essentially screwed. Sure there are convoluted ways to get at your data, but it is not easy and the end result is not pretty.
Now that you have been, hopefully, convinced not to rely on iPhoto. Let’s talk about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4. It can be your friend. The added features and freedom come at a price. There is a learning curve and the interface isn’t nearly as intuitive as it should be. To help ease you into using it, Adobe provides a lot of free learning material to get you started.
With Lightroom you have full control over your photos. All your photos can be grouped together by collections. When importing you can create a custom collection or add a batch of photos to current collections. There are other extensive organization features including the ability to add custom tags to photos, add ratings, set geolocation data and use face identification.
Article comments
1 - JimmySmash
The key difference between Photoshop Elements and Lightroom is PSE is a consumer product, and LR is a professional product, aimed at professional photographers. That's the marketing differentiator.
2 - Michelle
Yes, but I think from a features perspective it seems comparable.