Lightroom Love-Hate

I spent a big chunk of today getting all my holiday photos out of the camera and loaded onto a real, spinning, magnetic disk. I know that flash storage is the future, with super speedy reads and writes, but it is also super expensive. Particularly now. So, I put all 1,669 shots on a local hard disk on my machine. I was worried that this would slow down the editing process as files were moved on and off the rusty platters, but I’ve not really noticed a difference in performance.

I’ve used Lightroom for photo editing for so long now that I think it is a habit I may never break. Even though it is consistently annoying and still won’t let you open more than one catalogue at once. I don’t consider myself as much of a pro with the tool, so I don’t have many pro-tips to offer. One thing it is worth remembering though is that you can copy and paste image edit settings very easily and apply the settings to lots of images at once. This doesn’t work too well for things like cropping, but it is a great way to apply the same style to a group of pictures. The AI object selection and layers are also well worth exploring. You can create export settings so that you can easily create downsized images from your originals. It is very easy to mark specific images (using rating numbers 1-5 or colours from 6 upwards) and then select multiple images by rating or colour. And you can attach keywords to images and then search for them, as well as find images from a particular camera or even lens.

So, actually quite useful then I suppose…