Lightroom 2.6: Not all kittens and rainbows.

I’ve spent quite a bit of my time and reputation pimping Adobe Lightroom 2.6. Over the last two days LR has pissed me off big time.

I just did a two day photo shoot, over 4000 photos. I wanted to try using LR’s export feature to convert the raw files to dng, put then in new directories and rename them. I didn’t think I was asking all that much.

The 4000+ photos were divided up into directories of up to 900ish photos. During multiple attempts to convert those 900 photos from raw to dng LR locked up. Not once. Not twice. Not three times. Four times. And yes, it was locked up. When there is no activity for 30 minutes that constitutes “locked up”.

LR 2.6 obviously has some problems with effective use of memory. Did I mention I’m running this on a Intel i7 with 4G of RAM. This thing should fly.

The other really annoying bit? LR doesn’t understand leading zeros in the export file name options. Thus I have to name the first file filename-1000.dng otherwise I’ll get:

filename-1.dng
filename-10.dng
filename-100.dng
filename-1000.dng

When what I want is:

filename-0001.dng
filename-0010.dng
filename-0100.dng
filename-1000.dng

Hey Adobe – this is just plain lame. Totally e’fin lame.

Nor does LR Beta 2 understand leading zeros.

This continued locking up put me hours behind in my processing. Lesson learned. In the future I stick with the Adobe DNG Converter.