Important Changes in LR3: Part 1

Everybody that follows Lightroom knows by now that Lightroom 3 is out. Lightroom 3 is not a revolutionary product, it's the evolution of Lightroom 2. I think that it's a good evolution. I've started migrating from LR2 to LR3. And I will be discussing the important changes. What's an important change? Something that I deem important. Doesn't mean that the rest is not important. It's not important to me.

I opened one of my existing Lightroom catalog, medium size, only 10 thousand+ photos. Lightroom asked me if I wanted to convert to Lightroom 3. Yes. 55 minutes later for a core2duo 3Gb RAM. The conversion took that long because Lightroom uses only 1 CPU to do the conversion. I'll comment on that in another posting in the future.

IPTC extensions

One of the biggest benefit of upgrading to Lightroom 3 is the IPTC extensions. This will change significantly the keywording.

From the Library > ’Right Panel’ Metadata and the down arrow until you get to the IPTC Extensions

Here's the screen:

This will change how we've been dealing with keywording. All this information used to entered in the keywords, now it's part of the IPTC. So the question:

Should I use the new IPTC extensions or stay with using keywords for that information? That will depend:

1. How brave, courageous and pure of heart are you? It's a lot of work to convert from one to the other.
2. If you are starting a new catalog. Definitely use the IPTC extensions.
3. If you have a small catalog. It's worth converting.
4. If you have to interface with customers that use the IPTC extensions...
5. If you have multiple staff doing keywording... you should convert to the new IPTC extensions, this will ensure that everybody enter the data in the right way and the correct spot.
6. If you have a large catalog, see #1.

I will be starting a new catalog, so I will be using the new IPTC extensions. It's so much simpler for searches.

• You can have both version LR2 and LR3 on the same computer. You just need to use separate directories/folders, which Lightroom does by default.