Abandoned Lightroom 1.0 - my list of critical showstoppers

Question

I have seen several recent examples of users venting on this forum but sadly, I have to symphatise as in my own experience the quality of the Lightroom 1.0 release, specifically the library module does in fact justify this level of frustration.
I was looking forward to Lightroom becoming the new gold standard and the app that I would spend days and nights in when I was not out shooting. As it is I have abandoned my trial with Lightroom after three days. I never got past the Library module (and since Ligthroom can't function without a library that sealed it's fate).
The stability showstoppers:
- Importing with generating previews always crashed after few thousand images, no option to generate 1:1 previews during import completely baffling*
- Importing without generating previews would randomly not import some of the images, deleting the library and starting again would cause a DIFFERENT set of images to be randomly not imported - no reason given, the images that could not be imported could be opened just fine in Camera Raw and Bridge would happily generate previews for them
- Generating previews after importing always crashed after a few thousand images
- Frequent out of memory errors
That's just the MAJOR stability issues. Then there is performance (I have about 30,000 images, not that I could ever import all of them into Lightroom...)
And then there are the functional showstoppers:
- I will absolutely NOT trust Adobe with my images or my metadata (not after the fiasco with Bridge corruping it's caches in EVERY release to date or the issues with files that were renamed on import getting corrupted, and an application that comes with a built in tool to check for library corruption doesn't exactly inspire confidence either) so I import in place and want all of my metadata to be stored in *.xmp files. BUT WHY OH WHY does generating previews cause Lightroom to write out an *.xmp file for every file it generated a preview for!?! Even Bridge was smart enough to only write out *.xmp files when I actually did something to the image!
- Since there is no way to disable 'folder aggregation', the folders view is usessless for trying to organize images. Try this, take a folder with 1000 images, create three subfolders and try to organize the images into subfolders. Every time you click on the parent folder you see all 1000 images. You have no idea which ones you've already moved and which are still in the parent.
- Why can't renaming 'files' just rename the files in the file system!?! Since Lightroom is NOT a browser it MUST NOT force me to organize / rename my images outside of it since it then looses track of the files.
Yes, I have logged all of these issues with Adobe. Have I heard anything from Adobe? No. Lightroom has been out for FOUR months. Given all of the stability problems that have been widely reported you would expect that a company that is in touch with it's users would in fact react and put out a couple dot-dot releases (1.0.1, 1.0.2) to address the stability showstoppers. That would at least enable them to get a feel if they're in fact addressing the most severe issues that their user base is experiencing. But no they chose to put their heads in the sand and pretend the users are happy and continue working on adding new functionality. Here is what's going to happen. They'll release 1.1 and half my showstoppers will still be there. And who knows how long we'll have to wait before the next release comes out.
*Yes, I am aware how much disk space 1:1 previews would use but I don't care, I have a 30" screen and I have no problem throwing disk space, cpu power or machine time at the problem but I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE to waste my own time waiting for Lightroom to perform processing 'on the fly' that could have been performed in bulk while I sleep.
Yours Extremely Frustrated,
Cezary

Answer 1

Lee,
With all due respect, I think that you're still missing my point and in doing so I believe you're making my case stronger! The disclaimer is that I don't apply any metadata to the image during importing (my camera already embedded my name in every raw file and keywording at this point doesn't make sense in my workflow).
The application of defaults is EXACTLY why I don't want the *.xmp files written out until 'I' have manually modified the image in some way. Applying the tone curve is great example. So today Lightroom applies a medium curve. Maybe tomorrow version 1.1 is going to get smarter and apply different curves depending on the contrast of the image (or some other default behavior will change, like what happend to the Shadows slider in Bridge 1.x, it used to default to 0, now it defaults to 5). But then we have the question of compatibility! Which images should it apply the new smarter defaults to? The natural choice is: images that the user modified should stay the same, new images and those that have not been modified in any way should automatically benefit from the new defaults. Comitting to defaults at the time of importing seems completely unnecessary. If they're defaults, why write them out at ALL? I wouldn't mind as much if the *.xmp files were 'empty' so to speak. But if I recall correctly, the're not, they include all the ACR settings at 'current' default level as if I manually set them.
As for 'What's the point of importing your images into the LR database if this is the case?'. I never said I like it using a database but I appreciate the pros and cons of this approach. I would use Bridge instead but it has a different showstopper: the generated previews are too low quality to judge image sharpness (see BreezeBrowser in High Quality mode for what a preview should look like, I posted about this in the Bridge forum recently). The low quality previews are THE reason I am looking at Lightroom but of course it also promises to be 'so much more' than Bridge.
Of all the issues that I consider to be showstoppers in the library module of Lightroom 1.0 this is the least important and I will agree to disagree with you. If 1.1 fixes the stability issues, improves performance and delivers a usable interface for managing files and folders that keeps them consistent with the file system I'll be happy to give Lightroom another shot even if it means *.xmp files being generated for every image as it's imported.
Cezary