Ever since Adobe announced a major update to Lightroom Mobile earlier this week (which has been met with much love), I have seen comments to the effect of “This Lightroom Mobile update looks really good, but has Adobe forgotten about Lightroom CC for the Desktop?” and even worse “Has Adobe stopped developing Lightroom for the desktop?”
It has been a while since the last major update for Lightroom CC, and understandably people are starting to ask questions like these. We’re all gettin’ a little antsy. We want to know what Adobe’s been working on (or maybe we just want to know that they are at least working on something).
Apparently, Adobe has heard these questions, too, and last week Adobe’s Tom Hogarty gave us some insight (on ‘Lightroom Journal, the Lightroom team’s official Blog) into what they’re working on for the next version. Tom wrote:
I would like to address concerns recently voiced by our community of customers around Lightroom performance, as improving performance is our current top priority. We have a history, starting with our first public beta, of working with our customers to address workflow and feature needs, and we’d like to take that same approach regarding your performance concerns. We already understand many of the current pain points around GPU, import performance, certain editing tasks and review workflows and are investing heavily in improving those areas. Over the past year we’ve added numerous enhancements to address your performance concerns but we understand we will have a lot of work to do to meet your expectations.”
As one who has been griping to Adobe about performance (especially the speed of displaying thumbnails and standard size previews) for years now, I was really happy to see Tom mention that Adobe is “investing heavily” on performance related issues and that improving Lightroom’s performance is their “current top priority.”
But beyond all that, I think Tom’s comments put a lot of user’s minds at ease (well, it certainly did mine anyway) — they’re working on the next major update, and their top priority is speed. Also, saying that their “top priority” is speed, that tells me they have other priorities as well, so hopefully it will have a few other juicy features, too. Anyway, if it’s gonna haul butt, I don’t mind waiting a bit longer for the engineers to do their thing.
Speaking of Lightroom engineers, when I did my Lightroom seminar in Minneapolis a month or so ago, I got to meet directly with some of the Lightroom team and engineers and gave them a ton of crap I shared many of the concerns and comments you guys have posted here on the blog or emailed me about. It was a really productive meeting, and they listened a lot, asked a lot of questions, and we had a great discussion. They are really great people, and they are truly committed to making Lightroom better and better. Many of them are photographers themselves; they use Lightroom for their own photography, and they understand us (and our struggles) better than you’d think.
One more thing…
Tom gave a link where users can give their feedback directly to the Lightroom team. Here’s that link (I encourage you to take advantage of this. This stuff matters).
My Lightroom Seminar is in Richmond Wednesday and Nashville on Friday
I’m going to have around 300 photographers there for my seminar in Richmond — don’t be the only photographer in town that’s not there – come on out and spend the day with me. Nashville (home of Brad Moore), is where I’m headed on Friday. It’s going to be epic. You should be there, too! It’s a Lightroom love-fest, and you’ll learn a lot. More details here.
Have a great weekend everybody!
-Scott
P.S. If you’ve got a sec, stop by my other blog today (scottkelby.com) for a very inspiring story for photographers.
