Lightroom Import
The concept is something that I worked up a year or two ago for Lightroom 2 - the jist was that users were confused about the import process and to lay it out visually would improve the "big bump" in the learning curve for the product.
The big bump is the issue of people not groking where
thier photos are being saved to. I've seen people
save their imports to all manner of weird locations,
and then get mad because they don't know where things
are. I've seen people claim Lightroom is obfuscating
stuff. I've even seen people claim LR imported stuff
right to the trash and they've been the victim of a
poorly designed product. I kid you not.
So the idea was to provide a nice overlay that would
show point A (the CF card for exapmle), the process
(copy, move, convert to DNG) and point B (the save
location - i.e. my Drobo). This new dialog does this
quite well - its much more explicit about where
things are going if you are cognizant about things.
I'm iffy on the the tree explorer on the left - it
just seems a bit overwhelming compared to the
"choose" dialog we just had, but it does help
visualize the where from a local drive. Jury out.
I do like that they do a better job of visualizing
what won't be imported (a nice vignette gray out
effect) on stuff that won't come over. And the
coolest thing I've found so far is that LR will now
move your .mov files from your video-enhanced camera,
which rocks. One had to be very on top of moving
video files because LR 2 just ignores them and you'd
have to manually grab them yourself. That meant
reinserting the card if it had been ejected and
canceling the import dialog again in LR before
digging them out of the CF card. Many a movie has
probably been deleted when the photog forgot.
One minor nit: the "No preview available" tag for
videos is hopefully a beta-isim - it needs a keyframe
image of the video and some graphics to make sure
people realize its a video.
I have not had time to see if the backup feature is
the same, or if the've improved on it to mirror your
choices for the primary import.
Finally, I'm also kinda confused why it has my local
hard drive and my user directory listed out as peers
in the destination tab when they're not. I'm assuming
its for convieniece but it could be confusing.
The import presets feature? Not sure yet. Might be
really useful, might never get used. Time will tell
on this one.
PhotoPlus East Day 2 was
just like day one. Our booth was mobbed. We gave out
all our SmugMugPro bags and had to turn away quite a
few dissapointed people. What I like about working in
the SmugBooth is that one in 15 people are already
customers who come to us and just say how happy they
are to be our customers. Very few have complaints or
requests - most just want to say Hi and that they
love us. Its weird after fielding odd Acrobat
complaints for years in the Adobe booth. And funnier
yet, if someone asks what SmugMug is while our happy
customer is there, they'll usually just jump in with
praise and encouragment. I just have to stand their
and smile.
Didn't get a chance to look around much yesterday.
And our biggest diversion of the day was to get a 10
minute massage before heading back to the booth.
That was sure nice.