Topical Tropical

Digital cameras have changed the photographic environment so much that we're starting to forget the bad old days of film photography. At the PMA 2007 Photography Exhibition that I visited today, I was playing with a Canon SLR camera attached to a massive telescopic zoom lens. The lens was on show, and the camera was just there to show off the lens.

A guy walked up to me and commented:

Gee, they've taken off the LCD from the back of the camera. They must've done that to stop people from damaging it.

I looked at the back of the camera, and was puzzled for a while. What an unusual camera back. Where indeed was the LCD?

And then it dawned on me that I was holding not a digital SLR, but a film SLR!

The backs of film SLRs are naked, black, and rather featureless. I've owned three film SLRs in my time, and yet I'd forgotten! The guy didn't look like he was any younger than me. Looking around the exhibition after that for film cameras, I saw none apart from historical pieces in glass cabinets!

What a strange experience! The future is now.

While waiting for Lightroom to upgrade itself from Beta2 to Beta3, I discovered that Lightroom uses SQLite! SQLite of course is a lightweight embedable SQL database that also just happens to come with Mac OS X!

This can only mean endless possibilities for software developers like me, who are also interested in photography!

(note: After I upgraded to Beta2 of Lightroom, I found that the bundled sqlite3 client was no longer able to open the database file! To solve that, I had to install the latest version of sqlite (3.3.6 at the time of writing), and all was fine again)

LightZone is primarily a photo editor. I'm really after a photo browser with some photo editing capabilities. That little mismatch is going to taint this review - you have been warned :-)

While it's no contender for Adobe Photoshop, it has some interesting features that set it apart from Photoshop. The developer seems to have taken a fresh approach in developing it - rather than copying the interface or user experience of other established photo editors.

As you use tools to edit your photo, little tool windows appear in the left hand pane. If you apply say a blur followed by a colour balance change followed by a clone tool application, you see their respective tool windows stacked in the that order. As you work, tools keep accumulating - kinda like a visible undo buffer. You can always scroll through the list of applied tools, and change parameters. You can also delete tools from this list - removing their effect :-) Finally, you can hide the effect of each tool. Oh, and each tool is really another layer, and can be blended into all layers underneath it using various settings :-) I found all this quite interesting :-) This felt very natural compared to the hoops you have to go through (comparatively) with Photoshop.

As a photo browser, it's medium fast (fastest in my experience so far being Picasa, and slowest being iPhoto). When you open a folder, it does a quick scan of the files - perhaps to grab metadata. Unfortunately LightZone doesn't use embedded JPEG thumbnails. This means that you have to watch the thumbnails being drawn. This process is a bit tiresome, but performed in a background thread, so the user interface remains responsive.

LightZone doesn't have a metadata library. This means that any searches that you perform with it work with a single folder at a time only :-( That makes its search feature quite useless in my opinion. It does support some EXIF metadata searching like aperture size, etc., but it doesn't support the all important keyword search!

My quest to find a Picasa like tool for my new MacBook Pro is still on. I've tried a lot of tools, but nothing compares to Picasa - which is a real shame because Mac's are supposed to be really great for Arty people right? :-)

The top two contenders are Apple's Aperture, and Adobe Lightroom. They both suit my needs very well, but they have quirks nevertheless that make me unhappy.

This is what I'm looking for in order of preference.

1. Speed - I have to be able to quickly scroll through photos in the thumbnail view or in the fullscreen mode. There should be an illusion of motion when I flick through my photos. I take thousands of photos in rapid fire mode, and Picasa is able to scroll through them fast enough to give me the illusion that I was watching a movie.
   
2. Search - It has to be able to search by keywords, the directory name that the photos are in, and other EXIF details like aperture, etc.
   
3. Multiple libraries or catalogues - This is something that Picasa is bad at. My library of photos is currently about 260gb. I don't have a single hard drive that can fit all my photos unfortunately. I wish I had two 500gb drives (one as a backup), but until that happens, I need a tool that can seamlessly refer to multiple photo libraries on different disks - some that may not be available all the time.
   
4. Minimal photo editing - exposure adjustment, sepia, b&w, smudge tool, etc.
   
5. Ability to interface with other programs - I should be able to select a few photos, and 'pipe' that list to a command. I want my photo tool to be extensible and scriptable if possible!
   

Lastly, but most importantly is the user interface! I need a responsive UI that stays out of the way most of the time, and one that makes maximum use of the keyboard. Mice are nice, but when I'm tagging photos with keywords, or assigning ranks, I really like to use my keyboard.

I hope I find something that I can work with :-)