Lightroom as DAM good enough

What are the limitations of LR compared to Iview for example for DAM?



Given that:

single user, images only, need to do offline keywording, captioning, sorting.



Master library is a single large FW disk of 10-20k images, archive to DNGs that are another FW disk and DVDs (which are truly backup as the Master is always the working set)



Need to:

Find images based on metadata and deliver (export).

Sort images (collections) for slideshows, agencies, galleries etc.



I maintain in the libray the RAW + xmp, and for key images a TIF/PSD from a r/t to PS and perhaps a print sharpened version or alternate (BW) versions. I've re-crafted my folder structure so that all of these are in the root project folder for each project, NOT in subfolders, so I can use stacks to hold a set of versions (RAW, TIF, print, etc) for each image.



I have heard LR has problems with large (more than 20k images) but for the needs mentioned above is there anything I am missing that iView may be better at?



I anticipate LR will keep improving the DAM part with new releases...
Lightroom as DAM good enough
Do you have a Mac, or a Windows machine? If Windows, I think it's fair to say that LR does not do offline management. It will associate keywords, captions, and such with images, but will not associate images with a specific offline volume. Instead, it associates the images with the drive mount point (E:\, for example).



There are ways to work around this, such as putting the content for each disk in a subdirectory with a name unique to and identifying that disk; however, these are all workarounds to a basic design/implementation limitation.



On a Mac, I understand that LR understands volume names for offline disks.



David
Lightroom as DAM good enough
One limititation is that searhes only enable OR, not AND searches, 1.e. you could search for balloons and things that are green, but not just green balloons.



George Jardine from Adobe said that would be fixed in ver 2.



Reid

%26lt;blockquote%26gt;%26lt;span style=''font-size: 90%%26gt;%26lt;i%26gt;On a Mac, I understand that LR understands volume names for offline disks.%26lt;/i%26gt;%26lt;/span%26gt;%26lt;/blockquote%26gt;Just to clear this up:%26lt;br /%26gt;%26lt;br /%26gt;It's not LR's fault, but a limitation of the operating system. Mac (as any Unix) mounts removable discs with their volume name into the file system. Windows mounts every disk with a single ''drive letter''. There's no special code in the Mac version of LR to handle those disc volume names ... Instead they would have to put special code in the Windows version of LR to work around the limitations of Windows here.%26lt;br /%26gt;%26lt;br /%26gt;Alexander.%26lt;br%26gt;%26lt;span style=''font-size: 75%; color: #408080''%26gt;-- %26lt;br%26gt;Canon EOS 400D (aka. XTi) %26amp;bull; 20'' iMac Intel %26amp;bull; 12'' PowerBook G4 %26amp;bull; OS X 10.4 %26amp;bull; LR 1 %26amp;bull; PSE 4%26lt;/span%26gt;
Thanks,

My first bump was in trying to import my flattened file structure and fiunding the bug that does not allow same files with different extensions (NEF, RAW, PSD, TIF) to be imported.



I have also started to see some limitations on searches as you mention, Reid. Nevertheless a better workflow than I expected and at 1.0 it can only improve.

Alexander,



In Windows, the disks have IDs - serial numbers. All the other DAM software I have used track offline media on Windows using the serial numbers, and allows the user to specify a ''user-friendly'' name for the disk.



You're right - it's not LR's fault. It didn't design itself, or the OS's under which it runs. I believe that this is a result of the fact that its primary development platform is Mac.



Mac has color management built in, too. I think that no one would take LR very seriously if the developers neglected that aspect of its functionality under a major OS. To me, it's hard to imagine taking it seriously as a DAM package when it omits such basic required functionality on one of the two OS's it supports.



I think that there is good reason to think that LR will get there, but it's not there yet.



David

%26gt;One limititation is that searhes only enable OR, not AND searches, 1.e. you could search for balloons and things that are green, but not just green balloons.



No true. If you click on keywords ''green'' and ''balloon'', you will get get everything with green or balloon as you stated. However if you search on keywords ''green'' and ''balloon'' using ''Find'' and ''Containing All'', you will get only images with green balloons.

I can live with it, but for right now I think iView is easier to use for tasks like entering IPTC metadata for individual images. iView shows a list of existing cities, for example, which cuts down the amount you need to type. And it is easier to edit captions in iView.



That said, there are TONS of things LR does better.