I Love Lightroom But...

Editing is easy, prepping the presentation is easy, the slide show works great, images look wonderful on my 9 foot screen, I love the virtual copies, I love that Lightroom works with PSD files transparently. I love, love, love so many things about Lightroom, but the finger gymnastics to keep it all going while sitting with clients was quite a balancing act not to mention a minor inconvenience.

All in all it was a positive experience but here are a few things I wish Lightroom could do in a point of sale situation. I need to explain that I use Lightroom a bit differently than most. I set up a different Catalogue for each client. This is much more manageable for a wedding/portrait studio generating 100,000 to 150,000 images a year. Having said that, here is a quick 7 wishes for Lightroom;

1. I would like to be able to grab the image in a neutral zone and drag and drop a full screen image directly into my Collections as I move through the images with my client. Touch it anywhere and it zooms the image.


2. I wish I could set up standard (default) sets of Collections that I activate with each client for their presentation instead of having to retype the Categories again for each new client.


3. Why can't I still put the images in the parent Collections into a new user order. The minute you create a subcategory, the parent freezes it's order. The minute I delete the "child" the functionality returns.


4. Delete a custom crop from the aspect ratio list if I "goof it up."


5. I wish that when adding music to a slide show, the folder select would persist to each Catalogue till I changed it.


6. I wish looping the music was an option.


7. I wish the music would fade at the end of showing the images selected for the slide show.

By the way, here is the list of most of Lightroom's keyboard shortcuts right here.
Matt Kloskowski has a quick video on his favorite shortcuts right here. It's worth watching.