In Episode 7, Brian Matiash has joined me once again. This week, we give our thoughts on what the future of Lightroom may be. We talk about Lightroom Classic as well as Lightroom (the cloud based version, which isn’t all cloud based anymore).
Matt Kloskowski
Interesting topic, but I fear that both participants to this podcast are too quick to dismiss the needs of other photographers and the substantial number of sub-par or straight-up missing features in modern Lightroom. The strongest example would be tethering: as landscape and wildlife photographer, I’m sure Matt has no need for it in the field, but for studio work tethering is an essential tool to check images and present them to models in real time. No serious studio photographer would consider switching to new Lightroom from Classic without it.
I use the ‘cloud’ version infrequently on my tablet while travelling, but despite constant improvements it still feels underpowered and inefficient compared to Classic. Last time I checked it was overly complicated to use presets, something that speeds up editing considerably in Lightroom Classic. While I like the new interface overall, it’s quite a departure from Classic, with some functionality moved to different panels, making it a steeper learning curve than it needed to be – also, they changed a number of keyboard shortcuts for no apparent reason!
The most glaring omission for me is the edit history list: in the modern version you can undo only one action at a time, and you can’t even see what you’re undoing in the interface! The lack of the mapping module is a major downside as well: modern Lightroom only displays where the picture was taken if the file already has GPS coordinated embedded, but you cannot correct the location data or add it manually. Others mentioned various other lacking features, from metadata support (it’s impossible to batch update capture dates for example, a small feature I need whenever I travel and forget to update the in-camera time zones) to virtual copies, HDR and panorama merging, color labels, and so on.
The discussion was prompted by the introduction of local editing in modern Lightroom recently, meaning that you are no longer forced to upload images to the cloud to process them. I agree that this makes quick editing faster, as you don’t need to go through the import dialog, nor worry about catalogs, a major sore point in Classic. But I think in this case you’re ending up sacrificing better long-term file management for the sake of short-term convenience. Which can be fine if you’re working through a photo shoot, editing and exporting what you need, and then archiving the files to rarely look at them again. But if you want to go back and explore your work, maybe do a series of images with similar themes over multiple locations or years, it becomes increasingly difficult if they are scattered across hard drives and poorly labeled instead of centralized in a catalogue.
This ties into the point about keywords, and how the two insist they’re obsolete. I tend to agree up to a point, as I mostly given up adding keywords to my images as well – it just felt like an endless chore. But this is again a trade-off: modern Lightroom can indeed analyze and tag images for various objects, scenes, people, but only if you upload them to the cloud! If you’re doing local editing in modern Lightroom, you end up missing both the AI-powered cloud search, and the manual keywords of Classic, so good luck searching a large photo library!
The same point applies to their suggestion of selectively uploading your ‘best work’ to the cloud: you’re fragmenting your body of work, making it more difficult to retrieve everything else. It also implies that when you judge a picture to be ‘worthy’ of upload, you’re never going to change your mind about it, nor about the many versions you didn’t upload in the first place. Certainly a valid workflow, but you can’t assume every other photographer is editing the same way and therefore would be fine with switching to modern Lightroom.
The bigger issue I see people having, which I also share to some extent, is entrusting their work to Adobe’s servers. This is a broader spectrum, ranging from practical concerns about upload speeds and internet connectivity, to apprehensions about becoming reliant on a subscription service and what happens to the cloud data if you cancel. Adobe is using synced photos to train their AI editing features, which can be a valid trade-off for some, but not for others – I can envision commercial photographers or their customers restricting cloud syncing for fear of inadvertent leaks. There are many instances where Lightroom Classic is clearly the superior choice, and I don’t think these use cases will disappear or fundamentally change anytime soon.
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