Lightroom = Overrated, misdesigned and buggy.

Question

So I have been using the V1.0 version of Lightroom, and all I can say is that it is overrated and most of it is just plain junk.
Don't get me wrong, the DEVELOP module is extraordinarily good, really really good, but the DEVELOP module has been surrounded by such copious crap that the overall program itself becomes a burden to use in any productive way.
Let's start with the library... what a joke. You have to import everything, a time consuming process that is utterly unnecessary if you just want to look through your files. It is buggy, slow and utterly network unfriendly. You can't copy, you can only move. It is completely unfriendly to network storage, taking 1.5 hours to do the same batch rename that a piece of shareware does in 7 minutes. The DAM capabilities are second rate at best. All for what? So I can search for keywords????
The Slideshow... useless. What good is a slideshow that doesn't let you do image ranking during a client presentation. I guess that we are expected to use pencil and paper.
Web galleries... the provided versions are amateurish at best... and the whole thing in written in some Klingon variant of XML which requires a PHD in programming just to create (or even change) a simple template.
Printing... nice but useless to me, since I send everything to a commercial printer, and the stupid module won't generate a JPEG that I can upload to the lab. And no, a simple export doesn't do it... tell me how to add a 1/4 inch margin to an 8x10x300 print file using export... can't be done.
Like I said, the DEVELOP module is fabulous. Give the Library a standard file browser capability (using just XMP sidecars), give the HTML generator a token based design so mere mortals can code for it, allow export from the print module, and make the slideshow actually useful for something and then the full program will be worth the effort.

Answer 1

I have been using Adobe Lightroom 1.0 for the last 3 weeks or so. I keep reading rave reviews but Im having difficulty seeing what others see. Here are some observations regarding Lightroom as a photo organizer specifically the Library module from someone (me) who is already familiar with ACDSee as an organization tool
1. Lightroom, like other Adobe products, eats an enormous amount of resources on my PC. Loading the program with even a moderate-sized database is slow especially if I am backing up the database frequently. Navigating around can be very sluggish. (I have 1GB of memory. Maybe more would help...?)
2. Lightroom can only see folders and photos that have already been imported into the Lightroom database. If you temporarily leave the program to process some RAW files somewhere else, for example, the JPEG or TIF files created will be invisible in Lightroom, until you import them. I think this is a stupid concept. In ACDSee, you can see everything from within the program even files that have been added using 3rd party software outside of ACDSee. Simply browsing adds stuff automatically to the database.
3. It is not possible to drag and drop photo files from Lightroom into another program one of the drawbacks of non-destructive file editing, I suppose. I drag & drop all the time with ACDSee and actually, it is a pretty important tool if you make use of a virtual system (categories, ratings, keywords, etc.) to organize your pictures. I print with Qimage, for example, and I have trouble finding photos based on the hard drive folder structure. But if ACDSee is open in category view, I can drag and drop the photos I want to process into Qimage. This is impossible with Lightroom.
4. It seems that Lightroom will only handle 2 external editors and one of them is Photoshop by default! Sometimes I want to send a photo to Qimage (for printing) or to DxO Optics Pro or NX (for RAW processing), or PTGui (for panorama processing). Every time I try to do this, I must change the External Editor preferences and hunt down the EXE file required to launch the program I want to use. Pretty cumbersome, I think. ACDSee allows setting up these programs so they appear as choices in the Edit menu, and it allows full use of drag and drop.
6. I think the Lightroom Loupe view screen is too small unless you close up all the sidebars. But if you are editing, you need to keep at least the develop sidebar (on the right) open. This leaves the full-size view rather inadequate, I think.
7. The small font is not very small. In the Library, I cannot see many of my Folders or Collections on the left without a lot of scrolling. And there is no way to distinguish between the Folder list and the Collection list they look the same and they both scroll in the same list! A different color or font option would help. The headings for these groupings (Folders, Collections, etc.) disappear from view when scrolling, making it even more difficult to figure out where I am! Poor design!
8. What is the point of the filmstrip? There is already a grid view. Isnt the filmstrip a little redundant? Granted you can make it disappear, but whats the point of having it there in the first place? It just eats up valuable real estate on a screen that is already way too cluttered.
8. I like the Lightroom develop module okay, but it is not as good as Photoshop CS2 for photo editing, or Capture NX for raw conversion both of which I can easily access from within ACDSee.
9. I do like the Lightroom renaming template. It facilitates a variety of renaming options and is more flexible than the offering in ACDSee. But right now, this is about the only thing I have found to be more usable in Lightroom.
I have decided that Lightroom is sort of like one of those do everything printer/fax/scanner machines. While it can be handy, it doesnt do any of one those functions particularly well. Better to have 3 separate devices each dedicated to one of those functions exclusively.