Everybody, and their dog¹⁾ has a review or announcement about Adobe's Lightroom 2. It's supposed to be the best thing since slice bread, it will even reduce global warming.

Since this blog is about “the business of being a photographer”, Lightroom has a new interesting feature²⁾: It will show you the tags already used in the other photos in the current catalog. This will help me in being more consistent with keywords.

My experience has been that buyers do not browse for photos, but search by tag, then browse the photos. Good tags will immediately increase the value of your photos. Photo buyers will be able to find your stock photos better. Photo buyers will only buy your photos, if they can find them. They will be able to better match their photo needs and your photos. Hopefully, you will have more sales.

Lightroom supports hierarchical keywords by using the “|”, the vertical bar. Dog|German Shepard and Dog|Doberman will belong to the Dog category.

• Cannot have a catalog on a network drive. This means that I will have to have 2 separate backups.

If you are using Digital Railroad and Lightroom, Digital Railroad has an upload plugin for Lightroom 2. There is a Mac and Windows version. The pluing not only will upload the images but will also upload your Lightroom keywords in Digital Railroad.

• Lightroom 2 Startup Guide -- PDF
• Photoshop Lightroom Support Center
• Lightroom Journal Tips and advice straight from the Lightroom team
• Lightroom Forums
• Abobe Photoshop & Lightroom killer tips

There are many other websites that track Lightroom, but these are the one that I track.