Adobe continues to "get things right" with Lightroom. The new enhancements available in Lightroom 2.0 are very cool.
There is a lot of discussion here in the forum about how the XnView GUI should be designed to manage categories, ratings, keywords, and other organization metadata. Though XnView and Lightroom are not competitors, it is very enlightening to see how Lightroom approaches these and other related issues.
The Adobe Video Workshop has 3 new and excellent video tutorials for Lightroom 2.0. The one you should watch first is called "Lightroom 2.0 Basics: What's New in the Library Module".
To see that tutorial (and the others):
1. Go here
2. In the upper left panel scroll to and select Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0
3. In the bottom panel, double-click the video you want to watch.
Yes. A LOT of programming effort lives in LR. It's probably a team of 50 people. On the other hand, it's probably not so much the code (though there is quite obviously a lot of fancy program code) as it is what the code does. Someone (or the team) has made mostly right decisions about how the UI is supposed to behave. This is v2 and I can tell you it is substantially different (and better) from v1.
For a good example look at how LR distinguishes between category/rating, assignment, keywords assignment, navigation, and filtering.
Navigation is performed by the collection and folder tree (on the left) of the Library mode. LR uses one tree panel for this.
Ratings, Flags, Stars, and Colors are assigned via a toolbar at the bottom of the Library module (above the film strip) and directly in the thumbnail itself.
Keywords are assigned in the keyword sidebar (on the right).
Filtering is accomplished in a toolbar above the thumbnail panels. The Filter functionality is what I miss in XnView. Filters tie together all of the various assignment metadata (stars, ratings, collections, keywords) with the file metadata (filenames, folders, EXIF, etc.) into a very responsive tool for subsetting and selecting your images.
Somehow, this "four corners of the compass" approach works well for me.
I still intensely dislike the need to explicitly "import" images into LR, though. Hate it. LR does not have a system drive/folder tree anywhere. This is a major advantage to XnView and one of the reasons I still spend most of my image management time in XnView.
Oh, and LR is extremely slow compared to XnView on my system.
