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Adobe Lightroom

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Why should I trust Adobe?

Feedback Type: Commentary

Contributed by: mediaVinci Monday, September 17 2007 @ 09:15 AM PDT

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Less than a month

Recommend Product: YES

Hello,

hm ... well ...

So, if I should decide to buy Adobe Lightroom today and I start building
my digital photo library using Adobe Lightroom over the next 3, 5, 8, 10
years or more ...

... Who is going to tell me, that I will not get dumped by Adobe once again,
if Adobe should decide to give up this software product or replace it by an entirely
new application OR by developing a software update which causes severe and
negative effects for updating, altering or maintaining my digital photo library
created with Adobe Lightroom?

Adobe did that already with Adobe GoLive (very clever btw) and Adobe
ImageReady.

My digital photo library will become quite extensive and thus very valuable
to me. (in a personal and emotional sense, not necessarily in a financial sense
dear Adobe).

So, the bottom line of my concern is ... why should I put my entire faith in
a software company any longer who is targeting a software market for
photographers, designers and web developers?

I would like to have this question answered in public on this forum by the
CEO of Adobe Inc. Mr. Bruce Chizen.

My 2c,

graphically & sincerely,

" C'mon man give yourself a hug. You can do it! "

Marc Klein
mediaVinci - The art of invention

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Comments

Why should I trust Adobe? - dbsjunk

You don't need to. Take a look at how Lightroom works: when you edit a RAW file it saves the editing information in an XMP file that can (theoretically) be opened by anything. Adobe Camera RAW in photoshop uses these files too. Any keywords can be embedded in the file so they're not stuck in the Adobe database.

The basic answer, however, is that the only thing you can do is save all your images in a format and hierarchy where you can get at them from anywhere. What I do is export all my images from Lightroom to my photo directory as JPEGs with the keywords both in the metadata and as part of the filename. Then I move the RAWs and XMPs over to an archive location. That way even if Lightroom goes away I still have my full image collection in an accessible (filesystem-based) hierarchy with all the keywords.

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Friday, November 16 2007 @ 08:33 AM PST

Why should I trust Adobe? - jeffhrsn

You forgot Premier...they ditch that one too for years. I don't get any warm fuzzies about the fact they brought it back way later. The damage was done.

I trust Adobe on the Mac platform at almost the same level as M$ - you are certainly taking your chances.

Aperture is just as good and detractors forget how young BOTH products are. They will always ultimate achieve parity so it makes no sense to go with Adobe on this.

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Friday, November 16 2007 @ 08:52 AM PST

Why should I trust Adobe? - pgagnaux1

I don't undestand what you say here, have you make some pictures in raw onetime?
LR has a complete conservative way to store pictures, they are conserved in original format and where you want if you want, then why did you say that?
I'm not a member of the adobe company, just a developer for LR from the beginning, and it's a very complete soft for professionnal as for amateur photograph for me.
Regards.
Pierre
english is not my native tongue, then excuse my language please ;-)

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Friday, March 14 2008 @ 06:17 AM PDT

Or Microsoft, Apple, Dell, HP... - Wiz

You're making a big assumption about what hardware and software you'll be using down the road, too...

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Wednesday, April 02 2008 @ 12:52 PM PDT

Why should I trust Adobe? - afterhours

There is no reason to believe what you are using now will be around in 5 or 10 years. In any aspect of the computing industry.

I'm uncertain what your gripe is with Adobe. I can't open a single application I purchased in 1999. Why, because time and technology marches on. With Leopard, anything 'Classic' is gone. Can Vista run the games, Word or Quicken you bought 8 years ago?

I'm not entirely upset. Since my 3400 and SE/30 have little financial value, and they take up less space than the printouts of what they hold for me, they are welcome to keep OS 9 and System 6.08 running in my office for years to come. If I need to assess that old data.

As for images, you are only as good as your last backup anyway. That's not Adobe's fault, nor Apples. If you have images that are so precious to you, I imagine you have them burned to good high-quality optical media and in a firesafe. Of course, the standards that we use to open a jpg, or read a CD or DVD may well change in the next five or 10 years. Then where will you be?

You have some choices to make: print decent copies of all of these images you find precious. Put them somewhere so that fire or termites or sunlight or water or squirrels can't find them. And they may survive for as long as you castigate Adobe. Same with your optical backups. Or they may not. All we are is dust in the wind, right?

That your favorite applications have been killed off -- well, last I checked, they still run, and run as fast, on the hardware you originally had for them. They haven't time-bombed or ceased to function. You can still use them -- readily. Nothing has changed because Adobe killed them off, or some other company went under. So why worry now? It's up to you to keep your resources. No one at Adobe is forcing you to upgrade. Why the anger?

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Wednesday, July 30 2008 @ 10:28 AM PDT