Import from Photoshop Album PSA to Lightroom (same in Elements?)

Question

Hi,
here my experience with the import from Photoshop Album to Lightroom.
1. Tags and Collection import
> OK
2. Tagging of the imported images
> NOT ALL of the imported pictures where Tagged!!!
This is really annoying, as you have no way to know it
before you search for them.
3. Import of the edited version of the pictures
> When a picture as been edited in Album, only the ORIGINAL one
is imported in Lightroom, not the edited one.
> At least, the edited one could have been imported with the original
in a stack!!
Import functionality is crap for now if you ask me.
What is your experience?
Régis

Answer 1

Because I've used PSA, PS and now CS2 and 3 for years, I had really hoped--indeed, assumed--that LR would be an elegant and trouble-free solution with which to migrate a large and growing catalog away from the slowness and lack of view in PSA, as well as adding RAW-handling ability (since storage dropped through the floor, I shoot JPEG and RAW by default). While the LR interface is pretty and the fleur-de-lis whimsical, LR is in my admittedly-limited experience neither elegant nor trouble-free from a database perspective. Perhaps in a few versions it will be, but it isn't now. The PSA import was a joke, operations are slow, and despite preference settings, it fires up whenever I hook up anything which XP considers to be an external drive. I have since licensed a previously-installed demo copy of IMatch, which I'd been holding off doing based on my flased LR assumption. Importing PSA to IMatch requires some simple under-the-hood work in Access (there are posted routines to accomplish this), but once that was done the import was flawless, with all PSA tags in their own cubbyhole and associated with the proper images. Why Adobe didn't facilitate this is a real head-scratcher.