Lightroom image management - ready for professionals?

Question

Hi
I have a client, which is doing professional gardening photography for various magazines in this topic. Her business ranges from magazine reports about individual gardens to delivering single images to different publishers as requested (for example by flower type, color etc.). The main thing is that her image portfolio isn't organized so much in individual shoots or contracts. An image can be sent to many publishers at any time. She needs to kepp track of this. She needs to know, which image has been published when and where.
Before moving to digital recently, she kept track of here jobs with cumulus, which had more database capabilities, but much less possibilities in image adjustment. Shooting only raw with a Canon 1 series camera, she choosed Lightroom as here image editing and managing tool. Beeing pleased with the friendliness of the user interface and many of its image editing and managing capabilities, she (actually we) are astonished, that even in a version 2 it is still not really possible to keep track of what happens to the images in a professional environment (despite the claim of Adobe that the product is made for professionals).
In essence the program isn't really capable of managing image data, which has a one to many relationship to the image (i.e. the instances of cases an image is sent to a customer). We experimented with virtual copies, which can carry individual metadata, collections (which cannot carry metadata) or storing the required data in the large description field. None of these possibilites were really satisfying. The most promising solution in using virtual copies, ended up in a maintenance nightmare, because it was too easy to forget, where to do which data management (at the master raw file or at the virtual copy).
Then, I learned that with Lightroom 2 there is a possibility to extend metadata, but, unfortunately with the usual limitation of not supporting one to many data (in the SDK-documentation called "spreadsheet type data"). The rest of the SDK documentation did not reveal any other helpful way of solving the problem as the SDK deals mainly with export plugin programming or web stuff, which is of no use to the client. It is rather disappointing that Lightroom's extensibility is still so limited. Where is the programming interface, that allows the development of complete new modules?
Given the slow pace, Lightroom development takes (I can expect that "breakthrough" extensions to the SDK will take even longer), I guess that my client can wait for another 3 or 5 years until anything close to true image management will come up.
So we have to look for some intermediate solutions. Whereas other software (expression media, idimager, cumulus) may have better database capabilities, they lack in raw editing completely and are often more awkward to use. Therefore, I would like to ask the community here, how they handle the tasks described above with Lightroom or with other tools? Perhaps we have overlooked a Lightroom capability?
One thing I thought of is to develop a special keyword hierarchy for contracts, but this also would not allow, all the images tracking needed.
Any ideas? I guess there aren't any plugins, which can deal with one to many data.
Kind regards
Thomas

Answer 1

Actually, we haven't ruled out keywords yet, in fact, at the moment it seems to be the only realistic possibility. However, I wonder if a growing keyword hierarchy can become unwieldy at the end, so I am sceptical, if this idea would deliver.
In general, I think that Lightroom should more move into the direction of beeing a platform for other vendors. The limitation to web stuff and export solutions isn't enough. I hope to see third party vendor modules, eventually one which provides more professional image management and tracking capabilites, exploring the fact that Lightroom has a database underneath it.
I would like to see a DxO raw conversion module or a lens correction module, fields where I think Lightroom and ACR are still not the best in its class (I think LightZone and DxO are the better raw processing engines).
Unfortunately, I do not see Lightroom going much into this direction. Probably this is already too late for the version 3 release, due in 2010 (?), so we need to wait until v4 (in 2012 ?) until the situation improves?
I believe many customers (especially professionals with precious time) need a fully integrated system, which can do image management and image adjustment at the same time. Lightroom is the right platform for it, if Adobe let it be.
Kind regards
Thomas