Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Adobe Lightroom 3's Bad English and Dubious Message

If you've visited this blog before you know that I'm a proponent of using Adobe Bridge as an inexpensive means of organizing and archiving a large image library. However, you might also recall that I use Adobe Lightroom as a way of verifying the files I've organized and uploaded to our server through Bridge (and as a way of perhaps anticipating the future direction of our organization).

Now, you'd think that with the gazillions of dollars Adobe makes they could hire people who code their programs with proper English -- but that nuisance aside, this is an error message that is simply pregnant with danger:

Here's where things can get a bit hazy if not downright confusing. The important thing here is to know which of the two settings is the newest -- if you choose wrong you could lose a fair amount of hard work not to mention the metadata.

Just be careful.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Guide to Using Bridge Workbook now available!

At long last I've finally proofed and published my little workbook on using Adobe Bridge to build and maintain a large image library.

Based on more than two years' worth of experience in building and maintain an image library of more than 140,000 photos shared and accessed by 18 users, this workbook is short but sweet with lots of room for you to jot down your own ideas as you review mine.

Any comments, suggestions or criticism would be most welcome and will likely make their way into the next version.

It's available from www.lulu.com.

Thanks for the support!

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Adobe Drive 3 - a hint of the future?

I suppose this post is really for CS5 users. While I’m only testing CS5 on my personal machine – our organization has no immediate plans to upgrade form CS4 to CS5 anytime soon -- what little I’ve learned so far leads me to the tentative conclusion that this is little tool is worth a serious look.

Two caveats right up front:

1. As I said, this is for CS5 users only
2. This only seems to work if your image library sits in a box with a url

If you answer yes to both of these then Adobe Drive is something that, on the face of it, appears to solve at least a couple of issues: versioning and offline work.

One has to wonder if Adobe is angling to provide something resembling a full blown DAM but without the horrendous cost.

For more information you can stop by Adobe TV and check out the handy little intro tutorial by Terry White: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-evangelists-terry-white/adobe-drive-3/

Drive 3 appears to be free - for a download: http://www.adobe.com/products/adobedrive.html


Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Beware remapping Bridge on your PC

If you're on a PC and for some reason you have mapped to your image library server twice and get confused about which drive letter you're updating/reindexing, you need to stop, identify the more valuable of the two drives and delete the lesser of the two mapped drive letters. But you're still OK.

This problem doesn't seem to be an issue with Macs.

If, however, you have to remap to the image library the bad news is you will have to begin indexing all over again.

Sorry. Se vrais.