Thanks for the notice, Cem. I am eager to see the release of LR 3. In my younger days I'd be jumping all over the pre-release product. But I've since learned it's not a productive action. I'd rather stick to business with my completely functional and more-than-adequate LR 2.x and wait until LR 3 is released to take the plunge. Hopefully it will be soon.
Hi Ken. I think that we will see the definitive version before summer as the beta 2 will expire by June this year. I don't expect Adobe to release a beta 3 after this one. But this is my own opinion and not based on any facts. I use the LR3 beta for testing purposes only, my production catalog is on LR 2.6 till the RTM version of LR3 will be released.
Cem,
If you check it out, then I'd love to know how the experience is compared to Capture One which I know use instead of Adobe Camera Raw. I'm especially interested n someone evaluating tethered control of Canon cameras natively and not via the Eos Utility.
Asher
Hi Asher. As Bart wrote previously, the tethering functionality is far from complete right now. I use the EOS Utility of Canon which is the best s/w for Canon tethering out there and it is free.
It's my understanding that an upgrade to LR 3 will require that I re-import my entire catalog of photographs. Is that true?
With almost 40K photos in my catalog, I'm not in a hurry to reimport everything, especially if it loses my ranking/flagging/ratings.
Hi Chas. The beta version does not import LR 2.6 catalogs, one has to import images again into LR3 beta v1/2. But hopefully the final version of LR3 will have the missing functionality to convert a LR2.6 catalog. If you save the LR adjustments to your pictures from your LR 2.6, the adjustments will be recorded in the sidecars for the raw files (and in the tif and jpg files themselves). When you rebuild a catalog in LR 3, all these adjustments and meta data will be carried over including ranking/flagging/ratings. So the only inconvenience of the beta is to having to rebuild a catalaog right now.
Charles,
40,000 pictures is a reasonable number to give some catalogs a headache, a hernia, heartburn and hiccoughs! Certainly Microsoft Expression can crash with that number. So how does Lightroom 2 behave with that amount of files?
Asher
Hi Asher. My LR 2.6 catalog has 100K+ images and it behaves very well. I think it is a matter of having the right specs for your computer: a lot of memory, a 64-bit OS, fast hard disks does it nicely. I never have any crashes, but I re-optimize the catalog every fortnigh or so.
Even on my rather old desktop computer (Sony Vaio P4 3.0GHz 3GB RAM 2.5TB Hd) it runs quite quickly unless I ask to see all the pictures in the catalog. In that case it takes an hour to load and render the previews (I choose not to store large previews).
I have heard from a couple of other photographers, notably sports shooters, that LR functions OK with catalogs of more than 100K photos.
I'm not interested in being a Beta tester, so haven't investigated the re-import issue personally.
Chas, as I wrote above I can confirm that 100K+ images in LR 2.6 is rather feasible.
I wonder how long it might take if you already had stored previews? I have previews of every picture at 640 x 640 pixels. That way my catalogs can be carried on my laptop without the originals. Any news on the new LR version's behavior with a large catalog would be appreciated.
Asher
Again, a large catalog is not a problem. If you want to make it portable though, you should not make it fully portable. Just export a subset of your catalog to take it with you on a laptop instead.
Cheers,